(Photos by: Amit Zinman)

Hundreds of concerned Portlanders shut down SW 4th Avenue outside City Hall today to raise awareness of climate change.

Led by Extinction Rebellion PDX and 350PDX, activists called on Mayor Ted Wheeler to declare a citywide climate emergency. In addition to a creative and colorful rally that took over the street, activists from Sunrise Movement staged a sit-in in Wheeler’s office.
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Students from schools throughout Portland have massed downtown today for the #ClimateStrike event. Reports are that it’s a big success with crowds much larger than folks anticipated.
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Cover of the report.
(View PDF here)

The Oregon Global Warming Commission met this week to review the draft of their 2018 Biennial Report to the Legislature. The Commission, created in 2007 to provide oversight on Oregon’s greenhouse gas reduction strategy, detailed that despite our current efforts, Oregon is struggling to make progress, and has actually seen an increase in emissions in recent years – the majority of it coming from the transportation sector (making it all the more notable that the transportation seat on the commission is currently vacant).

I took a look at the report and here’s what I learned…

The report begins with a powerful letter from Commissioner Chair Angus Duncan that begins with a quote from Winston Churchill about WWII: “Owing to past neglect,” Churchill said to the House of Commons in 1936, “In the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger…”
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Screengrab of City website.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales is appealing to local businesses in an effort to address climate change. As part of “Climate Week” which ran from September 21-25, he launched an effort to get at least 50 companies to “join the city in committing to reduce carbon emissions.”

This is an important initiative to watch for a few reasons. First, if Hales (and the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability) succeeds at creating a new coalition of businesses who care about climate change, it could morph into something that gives city council a counterbalance to the Portland Business Alliance — an organization that has tended to fight for the status quo of auto-dependence when it comes to transportation issues.

“There’s this notion that the City of Portland is green, but that the business community is opposed,” Hales said in an official statement. “That might have been true once, but not today. Today, members of our business community share our city’s values of equity and livability.”
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This is what downtown #pdx looks like from about 1/2 mile away. #thisisclimatechange #pdxtst pic.twitter.com/rXR7FGRgoW

— Leslie Carlson (@QueenLeslie1982) August 22, 2015

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You might call this winter the September that never ended.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

For all the freakishness of the warmest February in Portland history — forget the wildfires and snowpack, think of where housing prices are headed if we turn gradually into San Diego — we’ve all enjoyed the benefits.

At least 37,571 more times than last year, anyway.

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A new advocacy group is angling for Oregon to use its moment as one of the only fully Democratic-controlled state governments in the country and pass the country’s first statewide carbon tax.

The group, called Oregon Climate, is pushing a concept called “tax and dividend”: instead of sending the proceeds into government coffers, all of the revenue collected from wholesale fossil-fuel transactions — gasoline to a distributor, coal to a power plant, and so on — would be pooled and divided evenly among Oregonians in the form of checks worth an estimated $500 to $1500 per year.

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