Most recent 30 articles: Sightline
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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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Seven Ways to Pay for Long Rotations - Sightline (Sep 12, 2022) |
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Sep 12, 2022 · Once on the verge of intensive logging and development, former SDS Lumber Company lands in southwest Washington are now protected by working forest conservation easements. Source: @ianshivephoto / @tandemstock
This is the fourth installment in a six-part series discussing how to increase the age when trees are harvested. “Long rotations” refers to delaying logging and growing forests past a short “financial rotation age” to an older “biological rotation age” that stores more carbon, produces more timber, and improves forest health, water quality, and wildlife habitat. View the full series here.
Where timber plantations were once logged intensively on short rotations, ... Read more ...
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Northwest Carbon Markets Can’t Support Longer Timber Harvest Rotations - Sightline (Jul 11, 2022) |
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Jul 11, 2022 · A third-party carbon verifier measures tree girth for a Northern California carbon project. Source: California Air Resources Board.
Port Blakely’s Winston Creek carbon project in Lewis County, WA. Source: Port Blakeley
Nestled in the southwest corner of Washington, home to coho salmon and the occasional spotted owl, the Winston Creek carbon project is extending rotations on 10,000 acres of forest. By delaying harvest from 40 years to 60 years and letting these trees continue to grow during their carbon sequestration prime, Port Blakely, the forest owner, hopes to double the biomass of its forest.
According to American Carbon Registry (ACR) documents, this extension ... Read more ...
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Heat Pumps a Win-Win for Cascadia’s Now Hotter, Drier Summers - Sightline (Jun 30, 2022) |
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Jun 30, 2022 · Image by HarmvdB (license)
In June 2021, Cascadia weathered a scorching string of hundred-plus-degree days. Nearly 800 people died heat-related deaths across British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington combined. The town of Lytton, BC, burned to the ground after the temperature climbed to a record-shattering 121 degrees; streetcar cables in Portland melted; and roads in Washington cracked under the intense heat. Climate scientists found that a heat wave of such intensity would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
While extreme heat events like 2021’s “heat dome” are unlikely to occur annually, Cascadia’s mild climate is rapidly becoming a ... Read more ...
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The Pipeline Giant Behind Keystone XL Wants to Expand a Major Fracked Gas Pipeline in Cascadia - Sightline (Jun 15, 2022) |
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Jun 15, 2022 · Protesting a new fossil fuel project in our county by Francis Eatherington used under CC BY-NC 2.0
TC Energy, the Canadian fossil fuel giant behind the failed Keystone XL project and the controversial Coastal GasLink project in British Columbia, is quietly preparing to expand the capacity of a major fracked gas pipeline in Cascadia.1TC Energy merged with TC Pipelines, the company behind the GTN expansion, in March 2021. Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN), one of two large gas transmission pipelines that run through Oregon and Washington, pushes fracked Canadian gas from Kingsgate, British Columbia, across northern Idaho, eastern Washington, and central Oregon to Malin, Oregon, ... Read more ...
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A decade of successes against fossil fuel export projects in Cascadia - Sightline (Jun 01, 2022) |
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Jun 01, 2022 · Stop Kinder Morgan Vancouver Rally by David Niddrie used under CC BY-NC 2.0
Download Full Report
Since 2012 fossil fuel executives from dozens of companies, including Kinder Morgan, Pembina Pipeline Corporation, and Enbridge, have schemed more than 50 large projects to export coal, oil, gas, or their derivatives from Cascadia’s coast in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington.??
But local communities, Tribes, environmentalists, and local governments rejected calls to turn Cascadia into a fossil fuel export terminal. Thanks to a combination of local opposition, see-sawing energy prices, and regulatory hurdles, project backers canceled 40 of those projects—a ... | By Emily Moore, Senior Researcher, Fossil Fuels Transition Read more ...
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New Report: Forty Canceled Fossil Fuel Export Projects, with Nine Still Kicking - Sightline (Jun 01, 2022) |
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Jun 01, 2022 · Stop Kinder Morgan Vancouver Rally by David Niddrie used under CC BY-NC 2.0
View Report and Related Resources
Today, Sightline is publishing a new report tallying the various fossil fuel export projects that have targeted the coast of Cascadia in the past decade. It finds a great majority of them canceled thanks to a combination of local opposition, see-sawing energy prices, and regulatory hurdles: 40 of an initial 55 proposed schemes are dead.
Find this article interesting? Support more research like this with a gift!
The report also provides the first comprehensive accounting of the projects’ total carbon emissions impacts, calculating that if all had gone ... Read more ...
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Why Do We Choose Short Rotation Forestry Over Carbon Storage, Timber Supply, and Forest Health? - Sightline (May 26, 2022) |
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May 26, 2022 · Three stands meet in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon: a fresh cut, a young stand, and an adolescent stand (Source: Marcus Kauffman, OR Dept. of Forestry).
Extending timber harvest rotations is on the table as a triple bottom line solution—actually a sextuple bottom line solution. But is it really a good idea, and is it even possible? If so, how do we do it?
In my last article, I posed the question: do long rotations really boost carbon storage and produce more timber? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” This article investigates why today’s forest landowners log on short rotations and what stands in the way of extending rotations. In a future ... Read more ...
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Hydrogen’s Dead End: Home Heating - Sightline (May 24, 2022) |
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May 24, 2022 · Home smart thermostat. Photo by Serena Larkin
“We’re very bullish on renewable hydrogen,” hyped a representative from NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, when testifying in support of a 2021 hydrogen bill in Oregon. Hydrogen enthusiasm is at an all-time high, with the recent passage of multi-billion dollar subsidies by federal policy makers and major oil and gas corporations backing hydrogen projects, including Northwest utilities. Proponents of the fuel envision a future in which hydrogen—and specifically a strain of it being marketed as “renewable hydrogen”—heats homes and businesses, powers trains and cars, and balances the electric grid.
Renewable ... Read more ...
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No, British Columbia’s LNG Cannot Solve Europe’s Russian Gas Problem - Sightline (Apr 07, 2022) |
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Apr 07, 2022 · Image by Province of British Columbia used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A chorus of North American fossil fuel boosters is once again pushing for more pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, this time purportedly to help Europe quit the 40 percent of its gas it imports from Russia. For example, Deborah Yedlin, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Canada’s fossil-fuel capital Calgary, declared, “We must resurrect [LNG] projects—on the east and west coasts. It is a moral imperative.”
But like previous arguments for completing the mostly languishing LNG proposals on Cascadia’s West Coast, in British Columbia, these new ones do not add up. BC LNG proposals are ... Read more ...
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Yes, Long Rotations Can Yield Real Climate Gains for Cascadia - Sightline (Mar 17, 2022) |
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Mar 17, 2022 · This stand of western hemlock on the Olympic Peninsula was thinned over a decade ago by EFM. Source: EFM.
Forest owners want to know: Will extending my forest harvest rotation produce real climate gains? Timberland owner Richard Pine says, “I’m not entirely convinced.” And he’s not alone.
“Long rotations” refers to delaying logging1For simplicity, this article narrowly focuses on extending rotations in clear-cut (even-aged) harvests. Timberland owners can harvest uneven-aged, multi-story stands on longer rotations too. The rotation age is defined as when the oldest trees get cut. and growing forests past a short life, letting them reach something closer to what’s ... Read more ...
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Responsibly Sourced Gas: Boon or Boondoggle? - Sightline (Feb 10, 2022) |
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Feb 10, 2022 · Image by Richard Hurd used under CC BY 2.0
When Pierce Transit announced late last year that it would be rolling out a carbon neutral gas to power its fleet, it introduced a new term to our vernacular: responsibly sourced gas (RSG). It didn’t take long for skeptics to expose the true carbon footprint of this newly branded gas - it’s nowhere near zero. But were the transit agency’s intentions directionally correct, despite the misleading marketing? Eighty percent of Pierce Transit’s bus fleet is fueled by natural gas today; electric and hybrid electric buses make up only 18 percent. Until the transit agency can transition all of its buses to electric, likely many years out due ... Read more ...
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