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.]