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Roger’s post on car crashes a few weeks back got me to thinking:  what are the local car crash trends looking like, in an era of expensive gas? And as it turns out, the trends are looking good!!  The state of Washington recently released fatality statistics for 2008, and their figures show a sharp dip in fatality rates in the past few years.  As the chart to the right shows,...

Last week Seattle’s new Mayor, Michael McGinn reversed a city policy that prohibited commercial parking near rail transit stations and sparked a controversy. In some ways, it’s a hyper-local, even neighborhood-level, controversy but it also makes an interesting case study for parking policies in cities and towns all over Cascadia. Parking issues can be a third rail in local politics and leaders across the region often confront a similar problems...

Huge news from Oregon today: Portland General Electric is planning to shut down the state’s only coal plant by 2020, years earlier than expected. From the Oregonian: Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, however, PGE maintains that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders. Under the existing plan, both face the risk of making the huge investment to control haze causing...

A boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; a march on Washington; “I Have a Dream;” a bridge in Selma; a Nobel Prize; a balcony in Memphis—the flaming arc of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is now inscribed in American mythology. But in December 1955, when King was an unknown 26-year-old Baptist minister first thrust into leadership, the issue at hand—the particular cause—in Montgomery was African Americans’ right to sit with equal dignity...

How much petroleum is there in the stormwater pollution that enters Puget Sound? That question has lately generated a good deal of confusion and obfuscation. So let’s take a moment to get the facts straight. You can think of stormwater pollution as a set of Russian dolls. The biggest doll is total toxic pollution. Inside that doll, and nearly as big, is oil & grease. And inside that doll is petroleum hydrocarbons....

Here’s a story that caused a bit of buzz in the office earlier in the week. Apparently, researchers in Toronto found that university students who bought “green” products in controlled tests were less generous with strangers, and more likely to tell a fib. The researchers suggest that this is an example of “licensing”: when people act virtuously in one domain, they feel entitled to shirk in another. Or, to put...

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...

Climate scientist James Hansen has gone on the warpath against cap and trade. (See this op-ed in the NYT, among other recent examples.) Perhaps what’s most weird is that, for all his intelligence, Hansen doesn’t appear to grasp even the basic elements of cap-and-trade systems. In a blog post last weekend, economist Paul Krugman took him to task: …today’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the...

There have been a fair number of mainstream news articles expressing concern that the many promised green collar jobs created with stimulus funding are not appearing. These pieces often follow a certain hackneyed formula, citing a huge dollar figure from legislation passed earlier this year and then pointing to the fact that only a few workers have been hired. There are a number of problems with these reports that should...

In spite of what you may have heard, Europe’s carbon market is working beautifully. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has been operational since 2005 and we’re now getting a good look at how it functions. It turns out, it’s a remarkable success story, both environmentally and economically. Let’s briefly review the major pieces of evidence. 1. European Environment Agency. A November  2009 report finds that the continent is well...