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Decarbonizing the Northwest’s economy may seem like a herculean challenge, but local governments are well-positioned to advance on some key fronts. One prime opportunity for cities is figuring out how to gradually transition away from heating houses and businesses with oil and gas and instead use clean electricity. An obvious route is to simply ban fossil fuel infrastructure in new buildings, a strategy already adopted by several California cities. A...

Local governments can modify franchise agreements to alter how private utilities can build and operate their infrastructure,

There’s little debate that the global climate cannot afford to keep burning fossil fuels for decades to come. Yet even in North America’s most climate-enlightened precincts, there’s a ferocious debate about how to stop making the problem worse. Witness Seattle, where city councilmember Mike O’Brien recently attempted to outlaw gas installations in new buildings (except restaurants). He was met with a flood of opposition so overwhelming that the bill is...

Earlier this month, Google subsidiary Waymo announced the launch of a commercial robo-taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, after nearly two years of testing there. Yet just a few weeks earlier, automation expert Mary Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke University, said she doesn’t expect widespread use of robo-taxis in the next 20 years. So which is it? Will the robots show...

For the past several years, the Northwest has been ground zero in a debate over whether to build a trio of gas-to-methanol facilities that would be among the largest petrochemical plants in the world. It’s a $5.2 billion venture by the Chinese government that would fundamentally alter the Northwest’s economy and environment. Designed to use North American natural resources to fuel Chinese manufacturing, the project backers are looking for billions...

If car-dependent cities are bad, and they are, then shared e-scooters are good. You may have heard that private shared e-scooters—parked alongside the sidewalk by each successive user, waiting to be located and rented with the smartphone of the next—are the new hotness in the rapidly expanding universe of battery-powered “micromobility.” In the last 14 days, shared scooter fleets have launched in Dallas, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Milwaukee and...

The gas industry has big designs on the Northwest. In Washington alone, its agents are busy in practically every corner of the state: backing a pipeline expansion in north Seattle, a controversial LNG facility in Tacoma, an ammonia fertilizer production site in Longview, a giant petrochemical export project on the Columbia River, and amping up gas-fired electricity production everywhere. Meanwhile, the industry is also playing defense: trying to burnish its...

Climate hawks know the best way to decarbonize our economy is to electrify everything, fast. But we’ve made little progress electrifying transportation, the source of over half of the carbon emissions in Oregon and Washington. Shared fleets of autonomous electric vehicles—robo-taxis—could drive us to a low-carbon future much faster than the current plodding accretion of electric vehicles among individual owners. How slow is it? Despite all the buzz about Tesla,...

What a difference an election can make. On September 11, the British Columbia New Democratic Party (NDP) released its four-year budget, revealing that it will increase the province’s carbon tax by $5 per metric ton each year, reaching $50 per metric ton in April 2021. Hallelujah! This exciting change in BC climate policy is thanks in part to the small but mighty BC Green Party, which helped bring the NDP...

UPDATE Oct 7: We previously said that I-732 could result in a windfall of up to $200 million to Boeing. However, Boeing’s newly-released tax data suggest that it only pays $19 million to $60 million per year in state business taxes, and therefore would benefit from I-732 in the range of tens of millions per year, not hundreds of millions as we previously concluded. We updated the article below to...