It’s tough to keep up with everything moving and shaking in your city. Luckily, you’ve got us. Here are a few things to know from the week.
> Even the Space Needle is worried about the environment. Our go-to local icon is turning off the lights tomorrow night for Earth Hour, a worldwide initiative to encourage more action against climate change. The politics around that are shaky these days, to say the least; the Trump administration wants to cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency by a whopping 31 percent. But our state is putting up a fight. On Wednesday, Gov. Jay Inslee joined Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and other West Coast leaders to defend a policy called the Clean Power Plan, which Trump wants to scrap. On Thursday, our governor spoke to the United Nations for the first time ever — also about climate change. He wasn’t called the “greenest governor in the country” for nothing. Fun fact: He co-wrote a book about clean energy back in 2009.
> Boy, would we love to get around our own #$%@ city. We’re spending big and dreaming bigger for better ways to access our crowded, congested region. This week we learned that we spend more per capita on new transit projects than any other major city in the country. And that’s before we approved a $54 billion plan to get light rail to connect more than just a few lucky neighborhoods. But maybe science can save us? The Pacific Hyperloop campaign thinks we could be zipping around in tubes at 760 miles per hour before too long … if we just run a few tests and completely overhaul our infrastructure. *Sigh.* For now, it’s a real good idea not to drive around downtown between 4 and 6 p.m.
> Shake it off, Seattle. OK, so tourists ranked us 37th among the country’s top 50 tourist markets in the country. They didn’t like how expensive our city is, and this awful traffic. Fine. We still think we’re pretty great. This week our City Council approved the nation’s first renters commission to advocate for tenants in City Hall; the UW Huskies women’s basketball team made it to the Sweet 16 for the second year in a row; unemployment is down to 3.5 percent; and a “girl with blue green hair” walked around a block on Capitol Hill 100 times because she could, and because it’s interesting. Stay weird, Seattle. We love you that way.