Most recent 20 articles: Sightline
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Aging Solutions Are Climate Solutions - Sightline (Apr 18) |
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Apr 18 · Senior Couple Walking in London by Themeisle used under CC ZERO 1.0
When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments. Read more ...
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What’s Misunderstood about Indigenous Cultural Fire Is Sovereignty - Sightline (Apr 11) |
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Apr 11 · The Karuk Climate Adaptation Plan shows how cultural burning allows for species abundance. Figure by the Karuk Tribe and Kirsten Vinyeta. Used with permission.
“The piece that is misunderstood about Indigenous cultural fire is sovereignty.” That was one of the first things Bill Tripp, director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe, said to me when I interviewed him for Sightline’s research series on wildfire solutions.??
Each year, wildfires cost the United States tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. Policymakers are finally acknowledging what Indigenous peoples have been saying for decades: most forests need more fire, not less. ... Read more ...
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Washingtonians Will Soon Enjoy Cleaner Heating and Cooling Options - Sightline (Mar 21) |
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Mar 21 · Workers connect a sewer line to the South Lake Union Energy District in 2023 in one of the United States’ first large commercial projects to use sewer-system-generated heat as a renewable energy source for buildings. Photo by King County Wastewater Treatment Division.
The possibility of connecting your home or business to a clean heating and cooling network could be coming to your neighborhood soon.
Washington lawmakers have opened up a new realm of climate-friendly business opportunities for the state’s energy utilities. With the unanimous passage of House Bill 2131, introduced by Representative Alex Ramel (D-40), electric and gas utilities may now sell thermal energy, ... Read more ...
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How Governor Inslee Can Rebalance Washington’s Utility Decarbonization Bill - Sightline (Mar 14) |
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Mar 14 · Protection by Bruce Evans used under CC BY-NC 2.0
Washington state leaders set out again this legislative session to move the state’s utilities forward on a path toward electrification and away from gas. House Bill 1589—a bill that passed in the 2024 session and is to be delivered to Governor Jay Inslee’s desk any day now—is a move in that direction.
This bill, initiated by Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington’s largest electric and gas utility, requires the utility to proactively plan for the transition from gas to clean energy. The coalition of climate and consumer advocates who helped usher it to passage knew that to get PSE to retire its existing gas ... Read more ...
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180 Sites Account for a Quarter of Cascadia’s Carbon Pollution - Sightline (Jan 4) |
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Jan 4 · Cascadia chalked up major climate wins in 2023, from Washington’s renewed commitment to eliminating gas appliances in new buildings to Montana youth’s historic court win for a clean and healthy climate. At the same time, many Northwest climate hawks are gearing up for new challenges in 2024, including a likely bitter fight to defend Washington’s landmark climate law, the Climate Commitment Act, from a rightwing repeal effort.
Still, as policy debates rage, it can be easy to forget that every day, scores of huge polluters continue to dirty Cascadia’s air, making the worst effects of climate change ever more difficult to stave off.
Cascadia counts 180 stationary facilities ... Read more ...
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Is the Permitting Process for Transmission Lines Really Broken? - Sightline (Nov 9) |
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Nov 9 · Editor’s note:?This is the third of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, paying for it, and permitting - to building the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.
Permitting reform is the topic du jour in US climate circles. Renewable energy advocates and fossil fuel boosters alike are rallying to speed governmental approval of energy projects. At the same time, some progressives decry this effort as a misguided ruse to dismantle bedrock environmental and community protections.
How should climate leaders make sense of these debates? Just how big a barrier is permitting, really, to building the electric power grid Cascadia ... Read more ...
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Oregon’s Land Use Law Creates Wildfire-Adapted Communities - Sightline (Jul 25, 2023) |
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Jul 25, 2023 · William Kuhn, who lost his Bend, Oregon, home in the Awbrey Hall Fire, has a warning: “Anyone who decides to live on the edge of the forest risks losing their homes. We know that.”
Once considered rare, the “fire weather” that fueled the 1990 Awbrey Hall Fire is now a fixture of Cascadia’s climate. “It’s not a question of if, but when fires come through,” said Boone Zimmerlee, Deschutes County’s fire-adapted communities coordinator.
The 2013 Green Ridge Fire burns in the Deschutes National Forest (source: US Forest Service).
Building wildfire-resilient communities is key for climate adaptation. As I recently documented, the best tool for the job is guiding growth ... Read more ...
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Why Is It So Hard to Build New Transmission Lines? - Sightline (Jul 20, 2023) |
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Jul 20, 2023 · BPA transmission lines. Photo by Emily Moore.
Editor’s note: This is the first of three articles discussing the major challenges—planning, permitting, and paying for it—to building out the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.
Electric transmission lines—those giant high-voltage wires that zap electricity across long distances—recently graduated from a fringe topic to a core challenge in the quest to decarbonize Cascadia. More leaders and climate hawks now recognize the centrality of transmission capacity to meeting climate goals, but that recognition has yet to yield action. The Northwest grid is jammed, and hundreds ... Read more ...
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Transitioning Off Gas - Sightline (Jul 19, 2023) |
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Jul 19, 2023 · Cascadia boasts some of the most ambitious climate pollution-cutting goals in the nation. Meeting those targets requires millions of homes and businesses to transition off gas and onto clean electricity. But the state’s gas utilities are expanding, prolonging the lifespan of the polluting gas system and creating massive financial risks for gas customers. At the same time, gas utilities are obstructing decarbonization solutions while promoting dangerous, expensive, and unproven ideas like hydrogen for home heating.
Building and incentivizing clean appliances and infrastructure for individual homes - Cascadia’s approach to date - is necessary but not sufficient to meet today’s ... Read more ...
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Without Gas, What Business Models Could Gas Utilities Pursue? - Sightline (Jul 17, 2023) |
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Jul 17, 2023 · Carrier VRF/VRV Heat Pump by FanFan61618 used under CC BY-SA 2.0
Between 2003 and 2018, about 55 percent of adults in the United States abandoned their landline telephones in favor of wireless ones. Phone companies that rode the wave of innovation and diversification reaped financial rewards, while those that stuck with the outmoded landline strategy faced demise.
Like landline telephones, Cascadia’s gas utilities’ main business is quickly becoming obsolete. Gas companies are reckoning with disruption from all angles: consumers are buying electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, federal laws are boosting electric appliances, and new regulation is constraining gas ... Read more ...
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The Best Wildfire Solution We’re Not Using - Sightline (Jun 01, 2023) |
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Jun 01, 2023 · Bumper-to-bumper traffic as evacuees flee the Creek Fire (source: Kilmer Media/Shutterstock.com).
It’s time to address the elephant in the room: the best and possibly only practical way to protect homes from fire is to stop building so many of them in places that are primed to burn. According to Dr. Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist with the United States Geological Survey, “People are so fixated on climate change, which is a very real concern, but the bigger driver of accelerating wildfire damage is building houses in the WUI.” The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses are built in or near natural areas—either through urban sprawl or when satellite ... Read more ...
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We’re Stuck on a Wildfire Treadmill - Sightline (May 24, 2023) |
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May 24, 2023 · More low-intensity fires could have prevented the megafires that turned 700,000 acres of forest into a “moonscape” and incinerated more than one billion board feet of timber. That is what the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation claim in their lawsuit against the US government. There is good evidence backing them up.
Even with more flexible policy and some redistribution in funding, federal and state wildfire response still does not follow science-based recommendations to allow wildfires to burn when conditions are low-risk and to use intentional controlled fires to restore forest health and climate resiliency.
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution ... Read more ...
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The Northwest Needs More Midsize Solar - Sightline (May 10, 2023) |
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May 10, 2023 · Neighborhood Power’s Williams Acres community solar project outside Woodburn, OR. Courtesy of Energy Trust of Oregon.
To meet climate targets, the Northwest needs to build unprecedented amounts of wind and solar power and the electric transmission lines to carry it.
Easier said than done.
Utility-scale renewable projects—like acres-large solar installations or miles-long corridors of wind turbines—and the electric wires that connect them to cities and towns increasingly inspire opposition. They can require vast tracts of land, and, if not planned responsibly, can threaten sensitive habitats, prime farmland, and tribal rights.
In light of these ... Read more ...
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What Washington, DC, Can Learn from the Other Washington about Climate Policy - Sightline (Mar 09, 2023) |
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Mar 09, 2023 · Cherry Blossoms and the Jefferson Memorial -- Washington (DC) March 2012 by Ron Cogswell used under CC BY 2.0
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by the Niskanen Center, authored by Kristin Eberhard, the Center’s Director of Climate Policy. Prior to joining Niskanen, Kristin was the director of Sightline’s climate and democracy programs. She continues to serve as a Sightline senior fellow.
Some insiders in Washington, DC, have given up on carbon pricing. Across the country in the state of Washington, advocates had for a while done the same, after more than a decade in which numerous carbon pricing bills collapsed in the Legislature and not one but two ... Read more ...
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Is There a Future for Gas Utilities? It Could Be Heating and Cooling Your Home (from the Ground) - Sightline (Jan 11, 2023) |
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Jan 11, 2023 · Mercer Corridor Project October 2010 by SDOT Photos used under CC BY-NC 2.0
To meet Cascadia’s climate goals, we will need to stop burning natural gas to warm our homes, cook our food, dry our clothes, and heat our water. Buildings emit the second-highest level of greenhouse gas emissions of any sector in both Oregon and Washington and the third-highest in British Columbia, in large part because they burn so much gas.1Each jurisdiction calculates emissions slightly differently. Building emissions include both residential and commercial. As a result, policymakers across Cascadia are increasingly requiring that new buildings be gas-free.
But two major questions loom: how ... Read more ...
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Uncontainable Wildfires Are Inevitable. Community Destruction Is Not. - Sightline (Nov 16, 2022) |
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Nov 16, 2022 · This fire-hardened home survived the Beachie Creek Fire in 2021. Credit: Green Oregon, used with permission.
My family lives in fire country in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. A new era of megafires that no amount of firefighting can control is forcing all of us across Cascadia to learn a new way to live with fire. Wildfires have become more frequent, larger in acreage, and more severe,1The severity of a fire refers to the amount of vegetation (e.g., tree) mortality and soil impacts. and the risk they pose to those in their path is predicted to increase two- to sixfold in most areas of the West.
More firefighting is not the answer. What my family has discovered, and what ... Read more ...
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No, Hydrogen Is Not the Savior Gas Utilities Are Looking For - Sightline (Oct 24, 2022) |
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Oct 24, 2022 · Hydrogen Tanker Trailer by haymarketrebel used under CC BY 2.0
Cascadia’s gas utilities know their prospects are rapidly dimming. Decarbonization, now official state and provincial policy in much of the region, is an existential threat to businesses chartered by law to distribute carbon-based fuels. The companies are hoping hydrogen will save them, forestalling bankruptcy as the region leaves fossil fuels behind. NW Natural, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Cascade Natural Gas, Avista, and FortisBC, the region’s biggest gas utilities, are all developing plans for pumping green hydrogen1Green hydrogen refers to hydrogen produced from renewable energy. See Sightline’s hydrogen primer ... Read more ...
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Forest Long Rotation Harvests - Sightline (Oct 18, 2022) |
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Oct 18, 2022 · “Long rotations” refers to delaying logging and growing forests past a short life, letting them reach something closer to what’s sometimes called the “biological growth maximum,” which is the age that yields the greatest volume of timber from the land over time.
In this series, Sightline senior researcher Kate Anderson describes how long rotations can deliver not just greater timber yields, but also greater carbon storage and water and habitat benefits. She also details the barriers foresters face in trying to make the switch from the typical 40-year rotation to a longer 80-year harvest cycle. Finally, she examines how to financially support long rotations—both for the ... Read more ...
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Long Forest Harvest Rotations - Sightline (Oct 18, 2022) |
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Oct 18, 2022 · “Long rotations” refers to delaying logging and growing forests past a short life, letting them reach something closer to what’s sometimes called the “biological growth maximum,” which is the age that yields the greatest volume of timber from the land over time.
In this series, Sightline senior researcher Kate Anderson describes how long rotations can deliver not just greater timber yields, but also greater carbon storage and water and habitat benefits. She also details the barriers foresters face in trying to make the switch from the typical 40-year rotation to a longer 80-year harvest cycle. Finally, she examines how to financially support long rotations—both for the ... Read more ...
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Northwest States Need to Build New Power Lines, Fast - Sightline (Oct 13, 2022) |
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Oct 13, 2022 · The Northwest seems finally poised to reap the fruits of years of hard work on climate change. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, states and clean energy developers will soon enjoy a huge influx of federal climate dollars, and climate leaders sit at the helm of many state and local governments. But much like the proverbial kingdom that was lost for want of a nail, the Northwest states’ climate ambitions may suffer defeat over something utterly mundane: not enough high-voltage power lines.
That’s right. We may fail the climate test because we’re missing some wires.
A core strategy for decarbonizing the Northwest, as elsewhere, is to stop burning fossil ... Read more ...
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