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National and regional leaders in Canada and the United States are recommending cap and trade as a feasible, effective solution for curbing climate change. Sightline has worked closely with policymakers from the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) to design a cap-and-trade system for our region. This FAQ answers some common questions about the system.

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...

Over at Smart Growth America’s blog, Cary Moon — one of my all-time favorite gadflies—is doing some writing about Seattle’s ongoing viaduct saga. Go check it out.

The gist: A fair cap-and-trade system is a climate policy solution we can get excited about. Here are tips for taking cap-and-trade from meetings with fellow policy-wonks and to a broader audience without losing momentum. We also point out cap-and-trade policy essentials — the ingredients for effective, efficient, and fair policy — as well as the most common pitfalls and offer some tips for avoiding them. Cap-and-trade: Everybody’s talking about...

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....

Well, it looks like it’s going to be a light blogging week, as Clark and I are traveling to Portland for a batch of meetings related to the Western Climate Initiative. So, on the off chance that you’ll miss us, I thought I’d share some of what we’re working on with WCI. Our biggest obsession right now is transportation fuels. Namely, we believe it’s critically important that transportation fuels be...

Lately it feels like Northwest wilderness protection can’t catch a break. Not only has it proved damnably difficult to pass even popular new wilderness designations, but much-loved trails and access roads are gettingpummeled by winter storms. Routinely it seems.  But maybe—just maybe — there’s a golden opportunity amidst the storm wreckage. Maybe we’ve been given a cheap and easy way to expand our wilderness areas. After all, a washed-out or heavily-damaged road means more than just frustrated hikers:...

A while back, I mentioned that I’d traded in my clunky old furnace for a new-fangled, super-efficient model. Not without some trepidation, though, since I took out a home equity loan to pay for it. For me, debt = yikes!!! But despite my aversion to living on borrowed money, I reasoned that—provided that things played out as I expected—the furnace would start paying for itself from day one. It was...

About a year ago, biologists officially ID’ed a wolf hanging around in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. It was a pioneer of sorts, striking out west in search of open territory away from the denser populations of the east. (In this case, the wolf probably traveled from central Idaho.) Today comes news that Oregon may now have its first family of wild wolves since they were killed off in the early 20th century: For the first time, state fish and wildlife...

We wrote a while back about the problem of “calorie density“—namely, that junk foods filled with fats and sugars are way, way cheaper than healthier foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables. And, depressingly enough, the price gap between healthy and unhealthy foods widened in the 1980’s and 1990s. So even though it’s technically true that food in America is cheap, healthy food is effectively out of financial reach of...