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Kristin E. I just read Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream by former SEIU president Andy Stern. I highly, highly recommend. After successfully organizing Labor, Stern started to feel concerned about the future of Labor, so he spent years asking economists, labor leaders, DEOs, and entrepreneurs about how the economy is working now and will work in the future, and...

Note from Alan: As I explained previously, Washington’s Initiative 732 has divided climate hawks so deeply that even writing about it is a task we undertake with trepidation. (To get a sense of the landscape, please read the introduction to the first article in this series.) Organizations and individuals we respect and have collaborated with for decades—indeed, many personal friends of mine—are on opposite sides of the controversy. Sightline has...

UPDATE, AUG 4: We added the first graph, below, to illustrate our analysis. UPDATE, AUG 3: Friends have suggested that basing some of our analysis on the sum of state tax revenue unfairly biases it in favor of I-732, something we certainly didn’t intend. Our estimated $78 million average annual shortfall is just 0.37 percent of $21 billion in state tax revenue, but it is 3.9 percent of CarbonWA’s $2...

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...

Margaret Journalists have been giving a lot of press time to the role of foreign investment and absentee ownership in inflating Vancouver, British Columbia’s housing market these days. But knowing how to interpret that press is another matter. Take for instance this recent article in the Walrus which blamed wealthy investors from mainland China for city’s soaring housing prices. These investors accomplish this, so Kerry Gold, the article’s author, argues,...

Tiny houses may be the darlings of the green-living set—with their own blogs, TV shows and documentaries, and cottage industry of builders, planners, and consultants. But they’re usually illegal. Across Cascadia, to pass legal muster, residential structures must comply with one of three sets of rules: building codes, manufactured home codes, or recreational vehicle certification. They also must comply with zoning codes, which dictate not how they’re built but where...

Eric I urge everyone who’s interested in oil-by-rail shipments to read Chris Carvalho’s recent op-ed in the Oregonian in which he does the math on derailment probabilities using the industry’s own numbers. The upshot? Under the current levels of oil transport, an event would happen about once every 30 months, in good agreement with the recent Mosier accident. It would shorten to once every 18 months in the gorge if...

Founded just eight years ago, Airbnb has become a $25 billion company that handles more rooms than any other hospitality entity on the planet. Suffice it to say: people like it. Also suffice it to say that Airbnb—a textbook “disruptive innovation”—is sending shock waves through the hotel industry and beyond. One such shock wave is Airbnb’s potential to exacerbate the housing affordability crunch in high-priced cities. Advocates fear that short-term...

The Cascadia region is low on the Zika list, with only a handful of cases to date. Currently, neither of the two mosquito species that carry Zika lives in Cascadia, nor are they expected to arrive soon, even with climate change expanding mosquitoes’ habitat. So, the primary risk to residents of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington comes from travel or sexual contact with infected persons who themselves have traveled. Even...

The next big fossil fuel fight in Cascadia may center on a proposed complex of LNG export plants and gas pipelines in northern Washington and southern British Columbia that almost no one is talking about. The plans could run afoul of tribal treaty rights, put the Salish Sea at risk of pipeline leaks, and turn the Northwest into a major carbon fuel depot for the Pacific Rim. Yet the project...