Cascadia

Shai Agassi “Beyond Oil” Video

Technologist Shai Agassi wowed some 500 participants at the recent “Beyond Oil” conference at Microsoft’s Conference Center, organized by the Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute. Not only are the ideas compelling, so too is the business plan and the apparent fact that Agassi seems to have a whole nation committed as a pilot project. Anyone with an interest in energy Read More ›

Cascadia: Naive Dream Or The Next Frontier?

This article, published by the Vancouver Sun, mentions Discovery Institute Fellow Bruce Agnew: Bruce Agnew, energetic head of the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center, finds British-rooted names such as the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound quite silly. The rest of the article can be found here.

Dream Of A Cohesive Cascadia Never Dies

This article, published by the Vancouver Sun, mentions Discovery Institute Fellow Bruce Agnew: Increasingly, the politicians of Cascadia are trying to cooperate, particularly on transportation and ecological issues and occasionally economic ones, says Bruce Agnew, policy director for Seattle’s influential Cascadia Center. The rest of the article can be found here.

Sims To Port: No Deal If Rails Stay

This article, published by The Seattle Times, mentions the Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute: Citizens groups and the think tank Cascadia Center at Discovery Institute have stepped up their campaign to put diesel passenger trains on the rail line that parallels Interstate 405. The rest of the article can be found here.

Cascadia-Microsoft Conference Speaker Shares In Nobel Prize

Phil Mote, one of the authors of the Nobel prize winning report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and featured in the Oct. 13, Seattle Times story reproduced below – was one of the panel members and speakers at the May 7th Cascadia/Microsoft “Jump Start To A Secure, Clean Energy Future” Conference. The conference centered on transportation Read More ›

Fans Of Plug-in Cars Build Their Power Base

Sometime in the future, your car may make your round-trip commute with electricity generated from rooftop solar cells. When you want to venture east of the Cascades for a weekend winery tour, an internal-combustion engine — powered by biofuels — would kick into action. This vision has helped propel plug-in hybrid cars from a footnote in automotive technology into a serious alternative that car manufacturers are working to bring to market within the next five to 10 years. Meanwhile, a grass-roots network of plug-in converts — professors, students, garage mechanics and others — is already fashioning the first generation of these vehicles in hopes of prodding the industry into faster action. They say these cars can get more than 100 miles per gallon for some travel. Read More ›

Visions Of A Northwest Hybrid Car Future Abound

Imagine at first hundreds of Northwesterners -- but later thousands, and ultimately tens of thousands or even millions -- plugging in their electric hybrid cars every night. Then they all commute the next day without dipping into their fuel tanks. Imagine that the other cars on the road, still using fuel systems more like today's, get around on the byproducts of cow poop or wheat stubble. Imagine further that this new fleet of cars carries devices to signal the traffic-light system, reducing congestion by half at rush hour. And imagine these same devices prevent cars from running into one another no matter what their idiot drivers do. The same devices could offer drivers a choice between the fastest route, the cheapest route (because many roads will have tolls) and the "greenest" route. These were some of the visions that emerged Monday at a broad-ranging conference of Seattle-area businesspeople, utility executives, public officials, environmentalists and others titled "Jump Start to a Secure, Clean Energy Future" at Microsoft Corp.'s Redmond campus. Read More ›

Cascadia: More Than A Dream

This article, published by the Vancouver Sun, provides an in-depth look at the Cascadia region, and quotes Bruce Agnew, Co-director of Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center For Regional Development: I think at long last the idea of Cascadia is beginning to get some real traction,” said Bruce Agnew, who heads the Cascadia Center For Regional Development, a Seattle-based think-tank that counts Read More ›

Welcome To Cascadia

Original Article Nearly three decades before the 2004 elections, author Ernest Callenbach asked a prescient question: If we Oregonians, Washingtonians and Northern Californians were in charge, what would we do? His answer: We’d leave the United States to its own self-created woes and build Ecotopia, our independent utopian society. The idea was a fringe notion in 1975, when Callenbach’s classic Read More ›

i5 interchange
Aerial view of Highway 5 Interchange, located south of Seattle Downtown near the Stadion,  with lots of Car and Truck traffic driving in all directions
Image Credit: Mario Hagen - Adobe Stock

The Cascadia Connection

The good news, in the consensus of dozens of citizen leaders and officials from Vancouver, B.C., to Eugene, Ore., who are working on a Discovery Institute project called "Connecting the Gateways and Trade Corridors," is that we really can solve our transportation problems. The key is thinking beyond political boundaries and beyond traditional transportation funding sources. Moreover, in improving mobility, we should not accept a decline in our quality of life. On the contrary, we can go beyond what many have considered possible, and add health to the economy instead of weighing it down with an impossible new taxload. Read More ›
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Flag of Quebec
Image Credit: mario beauregard - Adobe Stock

For Canada, breaking up is hard–and wrong–thing to do

Canada is a country where something terrible is always just about to happen, but never does. The terrible thing is usually the secession of Quebec. The mere possibility of a province seceding reminds a U.S. citizen of the relative stability bequeathed to our country by the Union victory in the Civil War. But hardly anything disturbs the political calm like breaking up one's country. And in Canada, that is a real possibility. Like Sisyphus, Canada seems condemned to roll the rock of Quebec up the hill of federalism, only to have it roll back down, over and over. Worse, federalist forces have to win every election that is held on the issue, while secessionists need only win once. Probably. You can't say for sure because, in Canada, referenda often settle even less than they do here. If Quebeckers next Monday vote for "sovereignty," it is still unclear what that will mean in practice. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien says it means separation, clear and simple. No more Canadian passports for Quebeckers. A division of the national debt, and no special favors thereafter. The federalists also are likely to back the Cree Indian Grand Chief, Matthew Coon Come, who wants his tribe's huge northern tracts in Quebec to remain in Canada. The chief argues that aboriginals (as native peoples are known) have the same right to secede from Quebec that Quebec demands from Canada. Read More ›