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Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, says we’re in climate denial. In a Wired Magazine interview, Norgaard puts it this way: “Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way.” And that means all of us, not just the classic case, card-carrying climate denier. So as the scientific...

To borrow Dave Eggers’ book title, the novel approach to cap and trade proposed by Senator Maria Cantwell is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Genius, because it is an innovative plan to create a best-case version of cap and trade. And heartbreaking, because by design and by omission it undermines the most important feature of cap and trade: a legally binding limit on carbon emissions. It’s true that Cantwell’s...

There’s a viral Web video making the rounds. I don’t like it.  (For context, read my first post on this subject: “A Story of Ignorance About Cap and Trade.”) Today, I’m going to catalogue its errors. You can find the transcript here (pdf), though just reading the transcript doesn’t give you the full picture of the snark conveyed by the animated cartoons that accompany Annie Leonard’s delivery in the video....

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week. To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its...

Over at Grist last week, Dave Roberts blogged about a recent—and very important—study by the National Research Council on the enormous hidden costs of energy consumption. I’m surprised that the study hasn’t gotten more press coverage.  It’s fact-rich, sober, and completely non-ideological—and, at the same time, it’s an incredibly damning indictment of the nation’s energy system.  The report looks at a variety of “external” costs of energy—that is, the costs...

Doug MacDonald is a Sightline fellow.  He served as Secretary of Transportation for Washington State from 2001 to 2007 and now lives in the Greenwood neighborhood in Seattle.  He mostly rides the Metro 358, 5, 48 and 70 and the Sound Transit 550, plus whatever comes along in the downtown transit tunnel.  It’s a fundamentally worthy public enterprise, facing the toughest of challenges:  sustaining service to its r ­ ­...

It caught my attention when I heard State Treasurer Jim McIntire saying he won’t be supporting I-1033 because he is concerned that if it passes, it could hurt Washington State’s bond rating, increasing costs for the state to borrow money. My dad has an annoying saying about borrowing and debt: “Neither a borrower or a lender be.” The quote is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is given as sage advice by...

A bit of a kerfuffle has broken out over a recent car advertisement between the new Hard Drive commuting blog at the Oregonian and the Bike Portland blog. Here, for your consideration is the ad:   Very funny. The ad shows people crowded in a bus and one guy negotiating his Segway down a crowded sidewalk. The car being sold passes an old Volvo with a “Powered by Vegetable Oil”...

Conservative Northwest think tanks, I am calling you out. I want you guys to talk about parking policy. Yeah, you heard me: parking policy. By my count, there are 5 prominent right-leaning, market-oriented think tanks in the Northwest: Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center in Seattle; Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia; Cascade Policy Institute in Portland; and Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC. Each of them prominently features a devotion to free markets...

If we want to fight poverty, the first step is to measure it.  Otherwise, we can’t know the scope of the problem, or where to focus our energies.  But measuring poverty is easier said than done, not only because the data on low-income families is spotty, but also because there are so many conflicting ideas about what it means to be poor. Of course, there is an official US definition...