Search Results

The gist: Drew Westen has said, “Wherever you’re heading, ideas provide the roadmap, but emotions provide the fuel.” In his acclaimed new book, The Political Brain, Westen shows, through careful scientific observation, that emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior (there’s a reason they share their Latin root). “[The brain] is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures,...

About a year ago, I was cautiously bullish on British supermarket giant Tesco‘s pledge to start putting carbon labels on its food. But I think that their progress so far—which I’ll get to in a minute—suggests an important lesson about the policy risks of treating a fuzzy exercise as if it were completely reliable. Tesco’s idea was that the chain and its suppliers would pay for objective, comprehensive reviews of...

British Columbia rocks my world. With the release of the annual budget today, provincial officials just announced that they will levy a carbon tax to help drive down emissions. Even better, the carbon tax will be a tax shift—surely the best instance of tax shifting in the Northwest: Finance Minister Carole Taylor vowed Tuesday that all money collected through the new tax will be returned through a package of tax...

For whom the road tolls: Drivers who cross the Highway 520 floating bridge would pay a toll as soon as next year under Gov. Christine Gregoire’s financing plan to replace the aging span. The state also should consider a toll on the Interstate 90 bridge to raise additional cash, Gregoire said Thursday, in releasing the 520 proposal…The finance plan assumes a round-trip toll of $6 to $7 during heavy commute...

Sightline’s research team is in Portland this week with other delegates to the Western Climate Initiative (WCI)—a collaboration of several western states and two provinces of western Canada to find ways to work together to reduce greenhouse gases in the region. Folks from British Columbia to New Mexico are working through one of the biggest questions of our generation: That is, how to design fair, effective, and efficient climate policies....

Update:Read the sequel to this post, where Alan reconsiders plug-ins. The weekend before Halloween, my car-less family got a loaner plug-in hybrid electric car to try. You see, the City of Seattle and some other local public agencies are testing the conversion of some existing hybrids to plug-ins to accelerate the spread of these near-zero-emissions vehicles. As a favor and, perhaps, for some publicity (this post), the city’s program manager...

A decade ago, we wrote that the bicycle is one of the world’s seven everyday wonders because it’s so simple, effective, affordable, and pollution-free. To that list, we might have added “enriching.” Bicycling for transportation pumps money into local economies. Bikes are wheels of fortune. If your community spends money building bikeways, you and your neighbors will cycle more. Your cycling will put extra money in the local economy. (I’ll...

The big story yesterday was congestion: the Texas Transportation Institute released its annual Urban Mobility Study to the typical fanfare. See, e.g., stories here, here, here, here, here, and here. The headlines, as always, are gloomy: congestion’s on the rise just about everywhere, and is wasting our time, gas, and money. The word from the researchers isn’t particularly hopeful either.  Sure, there are things that can be done to slow...

Many Cascadian cities, with state authorization, put special sales taxes on rental cars. The rationale, as best I can understand, is that rental car taxes are mostly paid by nonresidents: business travelers with expense accounts and vacationers who don’t vote locally. The emergence of car-sharing (and someday, I hope, ride-hopping), however, has invalidated this rationale. Flexcar and the Northwest’s other car-sharing enterprises serve local residents, and they have big public...

The gist: Sightline distills current scholarship and top findings from local and national opinion research into three key steps that focus climate change communications on solutions, opportunities, and shared values. The findings include several focus group studies conducted this spring and summer in the Northwest.The checklist helps get us started talking about climate with a more powerful and unified voice. Checklist: 1. Start with SOLUTIONS 2. Seize the OPPORTUNITIES 3....