Liberal Talk Radio

USA Today — the much reviled “McNewspaper” of my college years — once more shows off its better side: a laudable “informed populism” that the President and certain members of his party and the media (paging Matt Drudge) would do well to emulate. The newspaper is taking climate change seriously, and is publishing a series [...]

So to speak. The Seattle City Council writes a letter to the Zoo: As construction prices climb, and concerns about global warming come into focus, Seattle City Council members are having second thoughts about a four-level parking garage project at Woodland Park Zoo that it approved three times in the past six years. The zoo [...]

This month’s Wired has a great piece on a smart city for 500,000 people (that’s about the size of Seattle proper) being built from scratch: Arup believes good design can do something about this mess. Dongtan’s master plan — hundreds of pages of maps, schematics, and data — has almost nothing to say about architectural [...]

View of Mt. Adams from within the Goat Rocks Wilderness, taken during a hiking trip last summer. Just to put Earth Day in context, a couple of recent headlines from around Western Washington: On the plus side, the newly-Democratic congress passed a bill to create the Wild Sky Wilderness, one of the first wilderness areas [...]

Seattle is thinking about some really aggressive recycling programs to avoid building a new landfill. Good idea. But of all the proposals on the table, only one has to do with actually reducing the amount of trash we generate: • Ban or tax some products, such as plastic bags, disposable diapers, plastic beverage bottles and Styrofoam [...]

Is the Carbon Tax a better idea than a cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse gases? That’s the question. (See also Time.) Carbon taxes are simpler to administer and harder to cheat on. On the other hand, cap and trade systems guarantee a reduction. With a tax, it’s possible that the system will just internalize the [...]

I’m sure that Drudge, Limbaugh, and the other right-wingers who attacked Al Gore’s “hypocritical” power consumption at his Tennessee home will rally to his side now that it’s been revealed that onerous local regulations prevented him from installing solar panels on his roof. It’s clear that the city of Nashville hates freedom, and wants to [...]

As the Professor has often noted, corporate liability concerns will drive the global warming debate: “What businesses need to move forward is a mandatory policy that finally will address the global financial risk of climate change,” Mindy S. Lubber, Ceres president, said in an interview. “It’s very hard for businesses to act without certainty.” (via [...]

Win some, lose some. Anyone headed down to Mt. Rainier — be careful! From what I can tell, the park’s infrastructure was badly damaged in last December’s storms. Much of it won’t re-open for months or, given the backlog of NPS maintenance projects, probably years.

Thanks to Muscleman Political Consulting, LLC: Late last year, [British Columbia Premier Gordon] Campbell sought advice from Schwarzenegger, who had reversed his own sagging political fortunes by championing some of the toughest environmental regulations in the United States. Schwarzenegger dispatched his chief environmental adviser, Terry Tamminen, to Victoria, B.C., where he worked quietly with Campbell’s [...]