They could just condemn PSE's infrastructure and start King County PUD.

Pretty easy to achieve. Just reduce parking spaces by 1/2, increase zoned height for meeting goals. All Seattle buildings other than SFH require solar on roofs, just apply to all new SFH too.

Done.

Now stop whining.

Seattle UW Campus will have 1440 MW of solar on all buildings by the end of 2016. We do. You whine.

Will dear, don't look now, but I think you a missing a decimal point.

I'm mainly motivated to comment here just to say, nice writeup, Ms. Brownstone.

At first I couldn't help but scoff at the whole notion of King County maintaining a Strategic Climate Action Plan. It brings back memories of Mayor Greg Nickels's silly, ineffectual effort to make Seattle a leader in the fight against climate change. What ever happened with that? If it was little more than political pandering, it scarcely even accomplished its goal considering Nickels couldn't even make it out of a primary.

I can't help but scoff at little, old King County pledging to reduce its carbon emissions 80% by 2050. While we're at it, I pledge to become a billionaire by 2050. Good thing we're just talking "goals" here. I can't help but scoff at a municipal government giving the impression that it can do anything unilaterally to combat climate change.

All scoffing aside, though, I find this plan by and large reasonable. By presenting a story about how we can buttress ourselves against the effects of climate change, and by presenting an image as a leader in renewable energy and conservation, we probably make ourselves more economically competitive, not less.

And I like Sydney's take here: But here's another way to think about the value of regional climate plans: They're opportunities to fashion cities into more efficient and more equitable places from the bottom up.
The changes we might want to make to reduce our carbon footprint (however quixotic by themselves) will make our region a better place to live, regardless of climate change.
So, while I'm good with this feel-good best-intentions act-locally stuff, it doesn't get around the reality that the only way to do anything about climate change is for the major powers to come up with an agreement that puts a price on carbon (good luck with that) and which, by reducing demand, doesn't make fossil fuels cheaper in the process for the non-compliant nations.

One more note. There was an intriguing article recently in The Atlantic about how to bend the supply/demand curve on coal:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar…

The problem isn't so much coal - coal is a problem for sure, but utilities are moving away from it in droves for a variety of reasons, both economic and regulatory - the problem is that PSE owns part of colstrip. If they stopped using their own product, they'd hurt their bottom line (particularly since everybody is moving away from coal)

inb4 Bailo says something fuckstupid about hydrogen