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Shipwrecks, Coal, and the Salish Sea
It was dark but it wasn’t stormy when the Salish Sea saw its first recorded sinking of a coal vessel. At 6:45 a.m. on November 21, 1886 the Barnard Castle, a freighter laden with 2,300 tons of Vancouver Island coal bound for San Francisco, struck the Race Rocks about 10 miles southwest of Victoria. The captain managed to beach the foundering ship in a shallow bay at nearby Bentinck Island....Read more » -
Look Who’s Taking Coal Money, Part 2
Excellent. At Seattlepi.com, Joel Connelly runs with with this story in a strong piece, “Northwest’s so-called ‘green’ law firms working for Big Coal.” If ever an industry needed lawyers, it’s coal. Widely despised for the range of harm it leaves in its wake—from asthma in kids to mercury in fish to dangerous drinking water pollution—the coal industry long ago became dependent on law firms to run interference with the rules...Read more » -
Views of Roe v. Wade at 40
What better 40th “birthday” present for Roe v. Wade than new polling data showing American support for abortion rights at an all time high. Seemingly bucking the conventional wisdom of a few years ago, that “support for abortion rights was decreasing, especially among young people,” a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 7 in 10 Americans believe Roe v. Wade should stand—including 57 percent who feel strongly about this....Read more » -
Impacts Up, Climate Coverage Down
Over the past year, climate impacts were felt more intensely and more frequently by more people—and Americans took notice. But analyses by DailyClimate.org and Media Matters found declining media coverage of global warming in 2012. But, take heart, there were a few surprising bright spots in 2012 too. Keeping us in the dark It certainly didn’t help that climate change barely came up during the US presidential campaign in 2012,...Read more » -
Servants Welcome, Roommates Barred
Scraped clean of rationalizations, roommate caps are simple. They are tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students. To reveal this elitist reality fully will require this full article, but one example shines a bright light on part of it: how land-use codes treat servants. At least six Cascadian cities specifically exempt live-in servants from the residential caps they...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 1/11/13
Eric: In the wake of the fiscal cliff debate, Public Policy Polling released (apparently serious?) survey results that are, hands down, the funniest opinion research I’ve ever seen. To wit: When asked if they have a higher opinion of either Congress or a series of unpleasant or disliked things, voters said they had a higher opinion of root canals (32 for Congress and 56 for the dental procedure), NFL replacement...Read more » -
Maintain WA’s Transportation Network with a Carbon Tax
Editor’s Note: This op-ed originally ran in The Seattle Times print edition January 3, 2012, and online January 2, 2012. We have a transportation problem. The governor’s Connecting Washington report identified a maintenance shortfall of almost $800 million per year over the next 10 years just to keep roads, bridges and ferries in safe working order. We have a climate problem. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, and...Read more » -
The Roommate Gap: Your City’s Occupancy Limit
When The Real World filmed its 2013 season near downtown Portland recently, it did so in apparent violation of city law, which forbids more than six unrelated people from sharing a dwelling. The Real World puts seven young adults with outsized personalities together in a house and films the resulting train wrecks for television. It’s not just Portland. In fact, Seattle and Spokane are the only big Cascadian cities where...Read more » -
Recent Coal Export Trends: Q3 2012
Here’s data from the latest coal report from the US Energy Information Administration, taking us up through the end of September 2012: Nationally, the big story is that coal exports fell in the third quarter by 15 percent from the historic highs registered during the second quarter. Still, at 31.5 million tons, coal exports remained higher than at any other time in recent history. A bit player in the national coal...Read more » -
Cargo bikes
Editor’s Note 5/19/16: In celebration of National Bike Month in the United States, Sightline is bringing back this cargo-bike classic. Since this article was published in 2012, cargo bikes have gained popularity and are seen all over Cascadia and beyond. Do you own a cargo bike? We want to know what you tow! Email us a photo at editor@sightline.org. It’s been a hard few months for us fossil-fuel-addicted societies: calamity in...Read more »