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Part 1: Your Car of the Future is No Car at All
Editor’s note: This piece marks the Sightline debut of Daniel Malarkey, our newest Sightline fellow. A Seattle native, Daniel will be writing about issues of infrastructure, technology and energy with a view towards sustainability. You can read his full bio here. Additionally, you can view his February appearance on Q13’s newscast here in which he speaks about the future of autonomous electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company recently had news for...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 1/12/2018
Clark The LA Times reports on a new study showing that the United States has become “the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into.” But it’s not a new trend: death rates among young Americans began to exceed peer nations way back in the 1960s. And while US mortality rates have fallen dramatically over the last 60 years, they fell even faster in the rest...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 12/29/17: Best Books of 2017 Edition
Alan As a personal project this year, I read a pile of books and articles about mass incarceration in the United States. The pick of the litter was James Forman, Jr.’s new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. It may be the best complement and counterpart to Michelle Alexander’s classic The New Jim Crow yet written. Forman, son of two civil rights leaders from the 1960s and now a...Read more » -
The Best of Sightline in 2017
2017 was a big year. We dedicated even more time researching solutions to create affordable housing in Cascadia and watched a few neighborhoods in Seattle adopt major upzones with affordability requirements. British Columbia expanded its existing carbon tax to cover more pollution and to raise its price. And the Thin Green Line only grew stronger. The continent’s largest oil-by-rail project proposal in Vancouver, Washington is on the cusp of rejection; key permits...Read more » -
The Thin Green Line: 2017 in Review
1. Don’t call it a comeback Despite President Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry, the US coal market is still shrinking. And the industry can’t look to exports to save it. November 2017 saw 20 nations and regions pledge to cease using coal for power generation by 2030, launching the Powering Past Coal Alliance at the United Nations climate change conference in Bonn. (We were especially pleased to see...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 12/08/17: Charity Edition
We at Sightline share our favorite organizations to help inspire your end-of-year giving. We imagine these organizations will need our support more than ever in the coming years and want to amplify the great work that is happening in Cascadia and beyond. Have a favorite organization you’re giving to this year? Share it in the comments below! Alan To me, among the most egregious failings of the United States is its...Read more » -
Granny Flats and the Great Affordability Debate
Does adding more new homes to a prospering city help or hurt affordability? Few housing policy debates are as tangled or enduring. Good people with aligned affordability goals disagree. There are those who think the answer is obvious because most new homes are fancy and expensive. And those who think the answer is obvious because prices always go up when there aren’t enough homes for everyone who wants one. Evidence...Read more » -
Coal Exports: The Russian Connection
Just a few days ago the news media buzzed over the revelations that the US Secretary of Commerce had concealed his business ties to Vladimir Putin. And many press accounts prominently mentioned a name I’d heard before: Gennady Timchenko, a Putin crony and former co-CEO of a multinational commodity trading firm. I’m hardly a Kremlinologist, so how on earth had I heard of Timchenko? From researching something surprisingly close to...Read more » -
Over 300 Places in the United States Have Used Fair Voting Methods
Editor’s Note: Yesterday was election day in Oregon and Washington. No matter what the outcomes were in this year’s races, plurality voting continues to constrain voters’ choices and yield unrepresentative results. Cascadian voters have the chance to reform their voting systems and ensure elections yield more representative and fair results every time. The most common method of vote counting in the United States—single-winner districts with plurality voting—systematically disadvantages representatives from...Read more » -
Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act Has Become A Bane To Sustainable Urban Development
Designed to meet the rigorous Living Building Challenge, Seattle’s Bullitt Center is one of the greenest office buildings on the planet. But that didn’t stop antagonists from hijacking Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) to stall its construction. Why? Because they didn’t like that it would provide no off-street parking and that its rooftop solar panels would block views and cast shadows. Washington enacted SEPA—a sweeping package of environmental rules—in...Read more »