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On the announcement that the Clean Energy Jobs (CEJ) bill cleared a key Senate committee last week, Friends of the Earth complained: The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. Sheesh. Of course, this isn’t true. It’s not even sort of true. It’s just an attempt to torpedo...

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 ­ ­...

If you didn’t know what blackmail is, David Letterman has probably made you familiar with it by now. Blackmail can be criminal or it can be something as simple as a kid a grocery store saying “if you don’t buy me cookies I’ll scream.”  But what about when business or industry uses the threat of lost jobs to persuade legislators to support or oppose legislation? We’ve heard this kind of...

Two new papers dig into the whys and hows of building higher-density communities, reaching useful and interesting conclusions. First, the whys. The National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board calculated the greenhouse gas savings if new housing was more compact and put homes close to jobs and other amenities. “Driving and the Built Environment:  Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emission,” a report requested by Congress...

According to two news stories today, the contents of my fridge—a six-pack, open bottles of wine, dregs from last week’s farmers’ market and leftover stir-fry—might help power my house some day. As the Los Angeles Times reports, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur has invented a system that makes ethanol out of old beer, wine and other waste kitchen products. My favorite part: the still doubles as a fuel pump for your...

The Northwest is currently undergoing another jag of “extreme weather” to complement the huge snowfalls of last winter. All of this has prompted many people to seek air conditioned relief or simply hide in their basements. Perhaps some desperate souls are huddled by their refrigerators. It’s definitely not an efficient use of the fridge, but 103 degrees is hot, hot, hot. Luckily, many of the appliances we use to keep...

I have been riding Seattle’s new light rail a lot the last couple weeks. There are three thoughts I have about light rail. The first one is a personal reflection and the second and third are about what I think it will take to make the light rail work in for the three counties it will serve.  First a personal reflection: I’m amazed. Not at the wonders of the technology...

If you didn’t catch Van Jones’s op-ed today in the Seattle Times, it’s worth a read. As part of the Recovery Act, the Obama administration is investing $80 billion to support clean-energy solutions. The biggest US investment in clean energy—ever. And Jones points out that not only is this creating green-collar jobs in our communities right now, these aren’t necessarily the jobs you might imagine. When we think of clean...

Editor’s note: A revised and updated federal version of Sightline Cap and Trade 101 is now available. Download Cap and Trade 101: A Federal Climate Policy Primer here. This post originally appeared June 11, 2009. It was based on the version of the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act (H.R. 2454, or “Waxman-Markey”) approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. By June 26, when the bill passed the...

In Cap and Trade 101: A Climate Policy Primer, Sightline sorts out the details on what’s emerging as the most popular and comprehensive policy solution to the enormous challenge of climate change. Sightline’s primer also looks at current bills, such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act.