Search Results

Ted In case you missed it, Brentin Mock has a (heartbreaking) tribute in Grist about 15-year-old George Carter III, killed recently in New Orleans. George was deeply involved with a remarkable student-driven group called The Rethinkers. He spoke of the power of gardens, real food, and nature to make a difference in kids’ lives under the toughest circumstances; there is some lasting power and resonance in his story that deserves to be shared....

I give a lot of talks about revenue-neutral carbon taxes—especially the Carbon Washington proposal to implement a BC-style carbon tax and use the revenue to cut sales taxes and business taxes. The question that is far and away the #1 question asked by conservatives is: How do you know it’s going to stay revenue-neutral? It sounds all well and good to combine a carbon tax with dollar-for-dollar reductions in sales...

A tax and a cap are just different vehicles for delivering the same thing: a carbon price that holds polluters responsible for their pollution, drives the transition to clean energy, andstaves off the worst risks of climate volatility. With a tax, you know the price in advance but not the quantity of carbon pollution per year; with a cap, you know the carbon but not the price. Could Oregon and Washington create a...

Alan A passionate and surprisingly plausible argument that “douchebag” is that unheard of epithets: a slur used to delegitimize white males. Affordable owner-occupied housing inside city limits? Hard to come by in Cascadia’s big cities, especially in Vancouver, BC, where bungalows commonly list for $1.2 million. But what if we allowed divided ownership in single-family zones? Patrick Condon dares speak the “subdivide” word in The Tyee. Split that average home...

Editor’s Note: Recently, we invited board members to contribute to weekend reading when they like. Chris Troth took us up on the offer this week! And our fall communications intern, Keiko Budech, also added a couple pieces to this weeks picks—enjoy! Alan This article, which filled my heart with happy, is about librarians on cargo bikes in Portland who deliver customized reading piles to people who live outdoors. “Street Books...

I think this chart speaks for itself. It’s fair to say that we’re in the midst of a full-blow media frenzy over the (admittedly worrisome) spread of the latest Ebola virus. Yet so far this year roughly 242 times as many people have died from traffic collisions—and I haven’t yet heard anyone call for banning cars, making driving illegal, or quarantining motorists. It’s almost as if we’re prone to focus...

We all rely on “mental shortcuts” to make sense of new information. Often, metaphor and analogy—or pictures—help us get a handle on abstract ideas. Right now, far-reaching climate and energy policy is back in the news, this time at the state level on the West coast where California has an established cap and trade system, Oregon and Washington are thinking seriously about putting a price on climate pollution, and British...

Alan Julia Roberts as Mother Nature. Kinda’ heavy handed? How ‘bout this? Eric This week brought more evidence that oil-by-rail industry is out of control. Another train derailed and exploded, this time in rural Saskatchewan. The next day, CBC aired an investigative report on the punishing labor conditions for locomotive operators who are being stretched thin by railway cost-cutting. It’s the same story we’ve seen in the US. Just so,...

In my last post, I took a look at streets that have been designed specifically so kids and cars can safely share space. That’s most definitely not the case on streets like this one, where a seven-year-old Seattle girl last week was critically injured by a car that hit her in a crosswalk, never even braked, and left her lying in the street. A bold experiment in Portland last week...

Life expectancy reached a new high in both British Columbia and in Washington last year. That’s good news, since it means that the residents of both jurisdictions are living longer, healthier lives. In one way of looking at things, the news comes as no surprise. Lifespans through much of the industrialized world have increased fairly steadily since the end of World War II, so record-breaking years are now more the rule than the...