If you believed everything you read, you could be forgiven for thinking that gas is a key solution to the climate crisis. Last year, The Seattle Times published an op-ed titled The Power Of Natural Gas in the War On Carbon Emissions, in which Executive Director of the NW Gas Association, Dan Kirshner, extolled the low-carbon virtues of gas — and in doing so revealed himself as nothing but a cheap con man.
On August 30th the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal quashed the Trudeau government’s approval of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project in a major legal victory for the environment and indigenous rights. Construction on this project is now officially stopped!
VIGIL AT THE WATER’S EDGE
For the last ten days we’ve seen a heart-rending example of how personal ecological stress can be. Carrying her dead calf day after day, local orca Tahlequah forces us to reckon with her grief—not just the broad tragedy of climate change and its looming extinctions. It’s a grief we’ll see far too often—in humans and all others—unless the status quo changes quickly and significantly.
Welcome to July! First up, big props to all of you who helped make sure that…
I-1631 WILL BE ON THE BALLOT
Big thanks to everyone who got pied up at Octopie on Saturday night! This month we’re upending our usual order of business and shouting out:
Fifteen months after the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to cease banking with Wells Fargo, it has renewed a three-year contract with the climate-wrecking bank. This is why we need a public bank.
Late last year, we decided to research Amazon’s climate impact…and it wasn’t pretty: Amazon’s shipping in 2017 alone released at least 19.1 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Done right, congestion pricing puts the burden of cost on higher-income single-occupancy-vehicle (SOV) drivers, and devotes that revenue to improved transit for all; this means that we get a fairer city, a less polluted city, and a city with more room for rapid transit, pedestrians, and bicyclist
Whether it was yet another police shooting, the war in Syria, or a pipeline protest, I felt powerless to make anything change. But Standing Rock seemed different, and events since then have confirmed that perception. It seems like the protest never died, just spread to other locations.
Lock yourself to your love. Sounds sweet, yeah? How about locked to your love to block the gate to a construction site at the crack of dawn, assuming you’ll be cut out and arrested hours later?
