Home » Environment » A Lost Decade: How Climate Action Fizzled in Cascadia
Washington, Oregon and British Columbia pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions. In a decade full of big talk and some epic battles, they all failed.
With dozens of people killed by wildfires in the western U.S., millions of acres scorched, and choking smoke spreading far into British Columbia, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee lit up the news wires in September. “These are not just wildfires,” Inslee asserted at a press conference from Olympia, “these are
climate fires.”
Two days later on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday-morning ABC News talk show, the recent presidential candidate recounted a poignant visit to a town nearly wiped out by the fires. “The only moisture in Eastern Washington was the tears of people who have lost their homes,” said Inslee. “And now we have a blowtorch over our states in the West, which is climate change.”
Cascadia Was Poised to Lead on Climate. Can It Still?
BC, Washington and Oregon all aimed to slash emissions. After epic battles, they failed. First in a series on creating a zero-carbon bioregion.
Peter Fairley is an award-winning journalist based in Victoria and San Francisco, whose writing has appeared in Scientific American, NewScientist, Hakai Magazine, Technology Review, the Atlantic, Nature and elsewhere. SHARES Aji Piper, now 20, was 15 when he joined a lawsuit against the US government for failing on climate change. Here he wears a mask during one of Washington s climate-driven smoke emergencies.
Photo by Alex Garland. [Editor’s note: This is the first in a year-long occasional series of articles produced by InvestigateWest in partnership with The Tyee and other news organizations exploring what it will take to shift the Cascadia region to a zero-carbon economy.]