Results tagged “environment”

The US Conference of Mayors will hold their fall leadership meeting this weekend in downtown Seattle.

Royal Caribbean, which offers offers seven-day cruises that depart Terminal 91 for Alaska every week, got a D in sewage treatment and an F in air pollution reduction. Slate estimates that your carbon footprint doubles each day you're on a cruise. You might as well idle your car for a week instead.

UW was awarded $126 million from the National Science Foundation to build an ocean observatory to study the Pacific Ocean. The $126M is part of $385 million being parcelled out by the NSF over 5½ years as part of its ocean observatories initiative, which is intended to build an underwater network to study climate variability and issues in circulation and acidification. UW will get $35 million in 2010 to install about 500 miles of cabling and sensor nodes on the sea floor, which will give researchers real-time access to oceanic data. They'll have their hands full.

Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel Co. has been fined $12,000 by the Washington State Department of Ecology for spilling sand and gravel into the Lake Washington ship canal. The company, which has been operating in Ballard since 1907, spilled sand and gravel mixtures, which can damage the marine habitat and clog the gills of fish from shoreside bunkers. They have also been cited by the Department of Ecology for lacking a spill-response plan and for not having any records of required stormwater inspections.

We don't listen to the "radio" but we do know of Thom Hartmann from his analysis of the rise of corporate culture, which is good reading. His Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, though, got us all stirred up with nowhere to go. (Check out the excerpt on sociopathic CEOs on HuffPo.)

Our good friends at the American Chemistry Council, a plastics industry organization, have pumped another $500,000 into the fight against Seattle's dastardly plastic bag "tax." Because if there's anyone out for our best interests, it's the plastics industry. And they're willing to put their money where their mouth is; this makes a total of $740,000 in contributions they've made. The pro-bag fee people raised a totally comparable $9,500 in June, for a total of about $65,000, mostly from local enviros.

Ex-King County Exec. Ron Sims may have moved across the country, but he's still tweeting locally--we see he's just read Joel Connelly's piece on global warming deniers at SeattlePI.com. (No, he didn't have much success at persuading the deniers: first comment begins, "Well as usual Connelly doesn't get it.") But since Connelly's point is that scientific research bounces off the deniers, ten seconds with the comments section persuades anyone else that he does get it. If you look at the Know-Nothing crowd as a crowd, you're tempted to wonder what they know you don't. But when you look at what they do believe, there's no united front there--just an assembly of cranks who misunderstand the scientific method, and prefer to come to their own conclusions.

During the long Q&A session after his Seattle Arts and Lectures talk, Gary Snyder was asked about climate change and everyone in Benaroya Hall mentally leaned in to hear. "I don't worry about it," said Snyder, taking the opportunity to mention that he thought about climate change in chunks of geologic time, 200 million years or so. There used to be palm trees in Greenland, he pointed out, and while we Pleistocene refugees may be freaked out at losing our glaciers, it's fair to say the world has warmed up more than this before.

Last week we held our first guest blog post contest, and the winner was LaFemmeMonkita! We sent her to the new Croc to see Dr. Dog. We chose her post because...well, not that it was a crowded field the first time out, but what could be more Seattlest than posting about recycling...and its olfactory drawbacks? Not much! Hope you enjoy it.

URGENT ASSESSMENT: Tonight at Town Hall, author and Canadian David Suzuki will offer what his blurb calls "an urgent assessment" of environmental issues. We're picturing him lecturing in double-time; after all, the environment might collapse before he finishes with even one of the topics he's planning on urgently assessing. No time to lose. Anyway, the lecture sounds promising, if you can bear to leave the park tonight.

We're number four on the list, behind San Francisco, New York, and Portland. SF and NYC we can see, because the data says that density equals more efficient use of resources, but Portland...come on.

We were just reading the Weekly's conversation with Cliff Mass about global warming's effects on the Northwest: in the coming years, "late springs and early summers may actually be cooler--at least in the Western part of the state." Compare that with today's Seattle Times story on spring coming earlier around here: "Dozens of studies concur that the onset of spring--as measured by the response of plants, animals and ecosystems--is about a week earlier than it was 50 years ago," and Lake Washington's "spring cycle of warming and algae growth now start three weeks earlier than it used to." Spring comes earlier and gets colder. FAIL.

Seattlest reader Nick would like to know what Seattle has to offer in the way of budget recording studios. We imagine he's asking for the best value, not just someone with a walk-in closet and fuzzy microphone. We used Jackstraw way back in the '90s for a project. They seemed reasonable, and it worked out well. What else you got? Also, if you have a second, why not vote for a Seattle entry in the "America's Best Restrooms" competition. Finally, if you're between the ages of 16-25, HotDish on Facebook is holding a competition for eco-warriors. Ends May 3.

So here's your update on yesterday's Seattlest poll, inspired by the NRDC claiming that luxuriously soft toilet paper is "worse than driving a Hummer!" since so much toilet paper comes from virgin forests. We wondered if green Seattle was putting its derriere on the line for the forests and the answer is--not so much! Only 29 percent of you reported using recycled-content toilet paper. And by far the largest contingent, 47 percent, were double-ply softies. We don't judge because we're luxury tp-ers, ourselves--we've always felt like we were balancing it out with the one-ply stuff you get in public bathrooms but perhaps that's just an ad hoc rationalization. Here's a scary photo over at Sightline to show us what our quilted habit costs.

We've just been tipped off by a reader that the NRDC has luxuriously soft toilet paper in its sights. "Worse than driving a Hummer!" they say, claiming that "more than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests." They're trying to raise awareness about the environmental cost of this "virgin" toilet paper, especially when it comes in multi-ply packs. 98 percent seems high to us--we're sure Seattle is willing to chap its collective ass a little for the sake of old-growth. But just to be sure, we're polling. Be honest now!

After a massively successful 21-year run, the Northwest Flower & Garden Show--the third largest flower and garden show in North America--is calling it quits.

A cool historical artifact has recently been discovered in Washington, but don't expect to see it in a museum anytime soon. The world's oldest weapons-grade plutonium was found at Hanford, according to a New Scientist article today.

There's an interesting piece in the today on the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, a citizens' group that's come up with an apparently effective way of decreasing pollution going into Puget Sound: suing the hell out of polluters.

According to the Puget Sound Partnership, 150,000 pounds of toxic chemicals find their way into the Puget Sound every day. That, along with being absolutely disgusting, is one of the primary reasons behind the urgency of the group's creation of an action agenda to restore the Sound to at least something resembling its former pristine glory. Yesterday, the PSP submitted a full agenda to the Washington state legislature at Gov. Gregoire's request; if you're interested in the details, here is the plan's full text [pdf].

Danny Westneat has 50 percent of a good column in the Seattle Times about adapting our hyperconsumptive ways to something we can all live with. But he tries to hang it on the "hypermiler" hook, a buzzword which "means going to extremes—in changing your habits as well as your technology—so you can max out your gas mileage."

Hat tip to Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry, who jumped on this Obama quote he found in Newsweek about the need for collective action on global warming--all over the U.S., we imagine, there's barely concealed public policy joy about having voted in a president who's his own think tank. Obama's discussing his performance in debates, and his struggle with answering questions that miss the mark: "So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

We just ran across the Seattle Times comparison of Gregoire's and Rossi's positions on the environment, largely cribbed from our exhaustive Seattlest coverage of the same topic. Republican Dino Rossi says maybe human activity is to blame for climate change, so operating on the theory than an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, "He...wants to spend $15 billion to expand highways and reduce traffic congestion, which he argues would reduce emissions." Seriously. He also thinks you should fix your leaky water hose by buying a much larger one and leaving it running all the time.

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It figures that on the same day the Dow sank below 10,000--its worst decline since...uh...last week--we'd also read that gas scooters and motorcycles are worse polluters than cars and SUVs. Thanks, Alan Durning! Sure, they're gas-sippers, but since you can't fit emissions equipment on the tiny little suckers, they're essentially like driving around a high-mpg leaf-blower. The EPA says driving some motorcycles 10 miles is as bad emissions-wise as driving a car 850 miles. We're going back to bed.

A plastics manufacturers' trade group has now spent over $180,625 in its attempts to prevent the City Council's $0.20 plastic bag fee from going into effect this January, the P-I reports. Thanks for caring about how much that $0.20 bag tax will impact our debit card balance, American Chemistry Council! We feel like you're really on our side, even though you're over there in Virginia, because you're throwing all this money at the cause. It's especially great to have more sneakily-worded petitions waved in our faces as we leave the grocery store.

           

Yesterday the Port of Seattle invited a rag-tag crew of media, runway protesters, environmental activists, local residents, and assorted schmoozers on a tour of Sea-Tac's third runway, a project about 20 years in the making, and set to open on November 20, 2008, pending final FAA certification.

There are 12 weeks until Election Day, and 12 issues in our state's gubernatorial race (13 if you count Eastern Washington's concerns). Each week we'll be taking an award-winning look at where the candidates stand.

In the wake of a brutal tussle between car and bicycle last weekend, it's good that New Belgium Brewing's Tour de Fat, the "traveling celebration of all things bicycle," arrives in town on Saturday, opposite the carbon-spewing, combustion engine worship-fest that is Seafair, what with the supersonic jets and souped-up motorboats.