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Top solutions–ranging from feebates to decoupling–for improving the region’s energy security and efficiency.

A cap on greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t mean much unless transportation is included. Here’s how to do it.

Two-wheeling ranks as the most energy-efficient form of travel, especially for short trips–and makes you healthier.

The research on the health impacts of exposure to PBDEs and PCBs.

There’s been a bunchofcommentintheblogosphere today about hiking gas taxes—with the rough consensus that it’s ok environmental policy, tough on the poor, and politically risky (though perhaps not quite as unthinkable as it once was). So it’s interesting to note that Oregon—often considered a policy innovator among US states—is in the middle of an experiment that could eventually lead to a repeal of the state gas tax. Oregon’s transportation department is...

In the New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman deflates the notion that widening income gaps are the result of education and specialized skills: …a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the...

At the risk of making this blog too Seattle-centric, I thought I’d point out this nifty article in today’s Post-Intelligencer about the city’s efforts to promote alternatives to the car—everything from walking to biking to transit to ride sharing to van pools.  And there’s ample reason to be concerned about rising car traffic, particularly downtown—not just on environmental grounds, but on financial ones.  Cars, you see, take up lots of...

A random call from a reporter piqued my interest—does recycling glass really save energy?  That is, after you take into consideration all of the energy spent to collect glass from people’s homes, truck the collected glass to a distribution center, route it to a glass manufacturer, and then melt it down for reuse, does glass recycling really save anything, compared with using virgin materials? I was actually fearing the worst...

Some more good, or at least interesting, news for 2004:  teen birth rates in Cascadia hit an all-time low. There were just under 27 live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, according to final data for the year.  That’s probably not just the lowest rate in recent history, but the lowest since humans first inhabited this place. (Just to be clear: we spend a lot...

From the NY Times yesterday, comes a surprisingly confused article arguing that home ownership has actually gotten less expensive over the last 20 years. Here’s the article’s upshot (and the part that contains the fishy reasoning): Nationwide, a family earning the median income – the exact middle of all incomes – would have to spend 22 percent of its pretax pay this year on mortgage payments to buy the median-priced...