Weekend Reading 3/4/11

Editor’s note: We’re trying out a new weekly post to share some of our favorite reads from the week—things concerning the Northwest, sustainability, or that are just plain entertaining. Let us know your favorites, or submit your own to editor@sightline.org.

• Center for Public Integrity exposes how reckless the oil industry is with workers’ lives.–Alan

• Evidence from Victoria Transportation Policy Institute that demand for vehicle travel is leveling off throughout the developed world.–Clark

• An arresting first-person account of the criminalization of poverty in the American West, from Harpers ($sub req’d).–Alan

• While the Wall Street banksters who caused the Great Recession and BP execs who allowed the massive oil spill walk free, at Grist, Bill McKibben reports that federal courts have convicted a young man who tried to make a point about our foolish and self-destructive dependence on dirty energy sources.–Alan

• Which Washington city is growing fastest? It depends on how you look at the numbers.–Clark

• Six years old, but new to me: a delightful pair of articles by uber-writer John McPhee on the trains that move coal out of the Powder River Basin, via the New Yorker ($ub req’d).–Eric dP

• The Center for Energy and Environmental Economics argues that the link between oil price shocks and recessions (pdf) is more than coincidental.–Clark

• In “Fair and Effective Carbon Prices,” economist Marc Lee argues that BC’s carbon tax isn’t high enough or fair enough yet. (Co-produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Lee’s shop) and Sierra Club BC.)–Eric dP

• Makers of the OneBusAway transit app research how it affects rider behavior (pdf).–Eric H

• The perennially killer Center for Neighborhood Technology has an 80-page report on the value of green infrastructure (pdf). A good starting point for making the case we can save money by going green.–Eric dP

• Parenting wearing you down?  Just think about how expensive kids are, and voila, you’ll feel better about them!  Ain’t psychology weird?–Clark

• Reuters writes the obituary for the eastern Cougar. In Cascadia, more than a thousand species were in peril the last time Sightline assembled a list.–Alan

• Cool diagrams from somethingaboutmaps of river systems in the style of subway maps, including the Columbia River.–Eric H

• What if climate change IS a hoax?–Clark