Daily Score Blog

Apparently Seattle city officials are fuming about this, but Gov. Gregoire has declared that the idea of replacing Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel is, officially, dead.

Now, I'm obviously an outsider to these sorts of debates; maybe "dead" doesn't really mean dead.  But it seems to me that the tunnel has been dead for a while -- or, if not completely dead, at least in critical condition, and hanging on by the sheer force of will of a handful of politicians.

But perhaps the tunnel's apparent death sentence opens up as many questions than it resolves.  You see, the state still has a little over $2 billion in transportation package money slated for replacing the Viaduct. 

So now that the city's preferred Viaduct alternative has cratered, what happens to the cash?

Just when US federal climate policy looks like a possibility, Seattle's prospects take a turn for the worse. The Washington supreme court just ruled that Seattle City Light -- the first (and only?) major utility in the nation to achieve climate neutrality -- can no longer use ratepayer money to buy emissions offsets.

Luckily, I think this problem can be fixed fairly easily. But before I get to fixing things, I have a small rant to get off my chest.

According to the court's reasoning, offsets are not sufficiently related to the utility's core business of generating electricity. I'll leave the legal parsing to be debated by the lawyers, but I will make two remarks.

First, almost all of City Light's power comes from hydroelectricity, which in turn comes from dams that rely on rivers that are fed by snowmelt. And -- I think you know where I'm going here -- climate change is very bad for snowpack. It's like this: no snow, no electricity.

So here's a simplified version. Global warming reduces the city's access to electricity. So the utility zeros out its contribution to global warming. But then the courts say that the activity is not sufficiently related to supplying electricity.

That noise you just heard was my head exploding.

Of course there are heaps of other sources of climate changing emissions too. But City Light can't very well do anything at all about those. All it can do is bring its own contributions to zero and thereby create a national (and even international) model of sustainable power generation. In fact, its leadership was probably much more important than its emissions cuts. But no more.

The rant continues after the jump.