But is it Affordable?
Last summer, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) prepared a report to the Vancouver City Council on the city’s EcoDensity Initiative pointing out the initiative’s weakness on affordability.
The backers of EcoDensity, a City initiative to make environmental sustainability a primary goal in all city planning decisions, argue that increasing supply by adding density will result in a decrease in housing costs. That follows basic economic principles, but we have also seen that increasing density, by itself, does not necessarily lower the price of housing. It’s well know that dense cities like New York and San Francisco aren’t very affordable, for example. According to the CCPA report, the same is true of Vancouver.
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Cantwell on Cap and Dividend
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell just came out in favor of "Cap and Dividend" -- a system for curbing global warming gases by auctioning off a limited and declining number of carbon "permits". Good for her -- we think that Congress should give Cap and Divident a close and sympathetic look. But one aspect of this Tacoma Tribune article on Cantwell's announcement is simply baffling; either Cantwell is confused or the newspaper is...
NW Gets Hot Under the Collar
We don’t tend to think of the Northwest as being much at risk from the ill health effects that come with climate change (save, perhaps, an increase in skin cancer in vitamin D-starved locals).
But Dr. Catherine Karr, a prof and pediatrician
with the University of Washington School of Medicine and School of Public Health,
and Elizabeth Jackson, a doctoral candidate with the UW’s Department of Sociology, challenged that notion. At the conference, they presented some disturbing
research predicting dramatic increases in the number of Northwesterners likely
to be sickened as the planet warms. And those hit hardest are likely to be seniors and low-income families, underscoring the fact that climate change is inherently unfair.
