Articles by Eric de Place

State Supreme Court rules utility cannot offset emissions

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.

Starting in Wash.

It looks like the Washington legislature is going to take up eminent domain soon. According to editorial coverge in the P-I:

A bill this legislative session should require general public notification (beyond Web-based meeting dockets) of condemnation decisions and direct notification of landowners by any government considering using eminent domain to acquire property. Openness is vital.

That sounds like an unalloyed good to me.

Turns out it’s high

Reducing our contribution to global warming may be expensive. Global warming itself, however, is likely to be much more expensive.

Report casts doubt

A new report questions whether the 358 U.S. cities that pledged to meet Kyoto's targets will be successful. That's a fine question, but it's perhaps easy to misconstrue as an implicit criticism that the promises were meaningless.

There is every reason to think that the cities can meet the targets. (And, heck, the pledge is only 18 months old!) Portland, in fact, is already well on its way.

What the report should serve to highlight is this: