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Articles by KC Golden

KC is policy director at Climate Solutions, blogs at GRIP, and serves on the boards of 350.org, U.S. Climate Action Network, NW Energy Coalition, and Renewable Northwest Project.

Featured Article

Sightline’s Clark Williams-Derry has a terrific post on the astounding decline in traffic on the Alaskan Way Viaduct since Seattle’s Big Dig II began.  Trip volumes are down 40% in just 3 years!  Clark analyzes the remarkable trend and concludes:

At this point, nobody knows if [tunnel-boring machine] Bertha will ever get moving again, let alone complete her job. But given these figures, maybe it doesn’t matter. Seattle has seamlessly adapted to losing the first 48,000 trips on the Viaduct. No one even noticed. No one even noticed that 40 percent of the Viaduct’s traffic just disappeared! Could accommodating the loss of another 62,000 be that hard if we, I don’t know, tried even a little?

Every day it seems clearer:  if we can stop the momentum of expanding-fossil-fuel-infrastructure-as-usual, we can figure out better ways to make energy and better ways to get our butts from point A to point B (and maybe make point A so awesome that our butts will be happier there.)

Of course, none of this is painless or automatic.  Car trips on the viaduct are down in part because of long-term investment in transit and increased congestion in spots.  Some... Read more

All Articles

  • Get old. Get free. Get over oil.

    I’m going to burn my driver’s license when I turn 75.  Maybe sooner.  I’d like to do it at the offices of Koch Enterprises, if I can get a ride home. You may think this is a choice to sacrifice some freedom.  But it’s the opposite:  a declaration of independence from the tyranny of oil. […]

  • The War on Truth: Which side is Harvard on?

    originally posted at Grip College students across the country are calling on their schools’ endowments to divest from fossil fuels.  The campaign is taking off. But Harvard University President Drew Faust has rejected the idea, without responding to student requests for a public forum on the issue.  In doing so, she turned her back on […]

  • King Coal’s tragic puppet show, Part 2 – Coal export is wrong

    …originally published at GRIP…. When last we left our intrepid heroes, the great Northwest had woken up to find itself cast in the wrong movie, sort of like Owen Wilson playing Richard Nixon (see Part 1). If we’re disoriented, it’s no wonder – what, with all the crap flying around trying to convince us that […]

  • The Keystone Principle: Stop making it worse

    This weekend's big protests against the tar-sands pipeline aren't just about stopping a single project -- they're a statement of principle.