Monthly News Archive:
January 2008
Table of Contents:
- Puget Sound Partnership Works Toward Crafting Agenda
- Northwest may harness volcanoes' energy
- Sound Transit weighs new ballot issue
- Cost to save orcas starts at $50 million
- Culverts add obstacles to salmon, state, politics
- Earth Saving Tips - "The Smartly Furnished Home"
- Gregoire urges fast action on climate change measure
- Pet waste is turning streams into sewers
- Western States Gather To Design Cap-And-Trade System
- Logging's effect on Southwest Washington floods debated
- Washington Climate Strategy Creates Jobs, Saves Money
- A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not.
- Citizens push $1 million program to save Seattle's urban trees
- Judge put limits on Navy sonar use
Puget Sound Partnership Works Toward Crafting Agenda
LACEY -- Puget Sound Partnership is moving into high gear in its effort to develop its first Action Agenda -- essentially a step-by-step prescription for nursing Puget Sound's ecosystem back to health.
The Puget Sound Action Agenda will guide public and private entities in the quest to reverse decades of environmental degradation while finding ways to accommodate a growing population that could love Puget Sound to death.
While some details remain to be resolved, the governing Leadership Council, meeting Monday in Lacey, seemed to endorse a plan to o...Read the full story
January 29, 2008
Add Comments...Northwest may harness volcanoes' energy
Deep beneath the Cascade Mountains -- where molten magma heats the Earth's crust, occasionally bursting forth in violent volcanic eruptions -- lurks an energy source scientists increasingly suspect might be tamed.
Though there has been little exploration and no deep test holes drilled to date, the geothermal potential of the Cascades, which run from Washington through Oregon into Northern California, is starting to attract a buzz. Some predict that in the next 10 or 15 years commercial-size power plants could be generating electricity.
"As this area is predicted to contain v...Read the full story
Sound Transit weighs new ballot issue
Many details remain to be worked out by board
Sound Transit officials are considering putting another transit-expansion measure on the ballot in the urban areas of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
The major question is when.
Voters rejected a $47 billion measure in November that would have expanded light rail service to Redmond, Tacoma and Mill Creek and would have built 186 miles of new highway lanes and ramps.
Sound Transit staff members said Thursday that they hoped the board will decide by March whether to put another proposal to a vo...Read the full story
Cost to save orcas starts at $50 million
That's assuming billions are spent to restore Puget Sound
Expressing "considerable uncertainty" about how to rescue Puget Sound's imperiled orcas, federal fisheries officials said Thursday that the job will take more than 20 years and cost about $50 million.
Even that price tag considers only the extra costs of the National Marine Fisheries Service. The agency's recovery plan for orcas assumes that billions more will be spent to restore Puget Sound and bring back battered salmon runs -- orcas' main food.
Environmentalists attacked the recovery plan, ...Read the full story
Culverts add obstacles to salmon, state, politics
NEAR KENDALL, Whatcom County — It doesn't seem like much, this no-name pipe, sluicing water into an unnamed stream that ripples its way to Bear Slough in the North Fork of the Nooksack River.
But small things can make big problems for salmon. This culvert was placed too high above the stream bed. It's a target no salmon can hit in its journey home to spawn. This pipe, and thousands like it, is as impermeable a barrier to upstream spawning grounds as the thickest, tallest dam.
More than 1,676 culverts from Neah Bay to Walla Walla block more than 2,37...Read the full story
Earth Saving Tips - "The Smartly Furnished Home"
Green tips are provided by Earth Share of Washington organization, Union of Concerned Scientists
If you are concerned about the environmental impact of your home, what should you do when you need to replace worn-out furniture? After all, a piece of furniture can contain materials that contribute in a small way to air pollution, global warming emissions, and tropical deforestation (at least 32 million acres of tropical forest--an area larger than Mississippi--are cut down each year, releasing 20 percent of all global warming emissions). <...Read the full story
Gregoire urges fast action on climate change measure
On the first day of the 2008 legislative session, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced a multifaceted climate change bill that could dramatically reshape the state's economy.
The legislation proposed Monday would lay the groundwork for concrete limits on greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2012. It would give the state Department of Ecology the authority to regulate those emissions.
It would require big polluters to track their carbon dioxide releases beginning next year, with annual emissions reports starting in 2010.
And it would establish a clean jobs training fund tha...Read the full story
Pet waste is turning streams into sewers
The county is finishing a $475,000 effort to protect creeks and encourage pet owners to scoop and bag.
What smells bad, sticks to shoes and piles up at a rate of 20 tons per day -- and not just during election years?
Ask Snohomish County dog owners.
The county's estimated 126,000 dogs produce enough poop to rival a city of 32,000 people.
"This is essentially the equivalent of the human waste of the city of Lynnwood or Bothell dumped in back yards every day," said Kathy Thornburgh, a county water and habitat sciences supervisor.
It's a...Read the full story
Western States Gather To Design Cap-And-Trade System
The conversation about how to respond to global climate change on a regional level gets down to brass tacks Thursday in Portland. Representatives of western states and provinces have gathered to design a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
What’s “cap-and-trade” mean? Correspondent Tom Banse sat down with Janice Adair to find out. The Olympia woman chairs the Western Climate Initiative.
At its most basic, cap-and-trade is pretty easy to grasp.
The government sets a limit on greenhouse gas emissions from a specific set of polluters. Each pollu...Read the full story
Logging's effect on Southwest Washington floods debated
OLYMPIA — A state Senate committee heard sharply divergent views Thursday about the role that logging may have played in exacerbating the early-December floods in Southwest Washington.
During the storm, dozens of slides ripped down heavily logged mountain slopes, carrying wood, rock and mud into the rain-swollen tributaries of the Chehalis River and downstream communities. The practices of forest-products powerhouse Weyerhaeuser drew particular scrutiny after The Seattle Times published a photograph of numerous slides on a clear-cut hillside in Lewis County...Read the full story
Washington Climate Strategy Creates Jobs, Saves Money
By meeting climate pollution reduction goals Washington state by 2020 stands to create 23,100 new clean energy jobs, generate $900 million in economic benefits and save $4.9 billion on annual fuel imports.
Those are the conclusions of a new state climate strategy released by the Washington Climate Advisory Team appointed by Gov. Christine Gregoire to craft a climate pollution strategy for the state.
“… we benefit from an enormous and perhaps unprecedented opportunity,” states A Comprehensive Climate Approach for Washington. “As we answer the clarion call and tackle global w...Read the full story
A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not.
Urban blight is an environmental issue that rarely captures the headlines. In fact, only one Earth Share organization - Scenic America - even addresses the problem of "visual pollution". Scenic America's Executive Director Steven Fry recently hit the road with the NY Times in an effort to raise the profile of this important, if overlooked, issue:
The wandering continues, along U.S. Route 1 now, the old East Coast byway that hurries ...Read the full story
Citizens push $1 million program to save Seattle's urban trees
The shumard oak on a vacant lot in northwest Seattle was planted more than a century ago by Josephine Denny, a daughter of one of the city's founding families. Its trunk measured more than 3 feet across. The owner wanted it axed to make way for a house, even though the tree was on the edge of the property.
Across the lake in Kirkland, two old trees were also tagged to be cut down, squeezed out by development. One was a Western red cedar with drooping branches, a towering presence on the corner of the lot on Market Street. On an opposite corner stood a large old cypress.
What...Read the full story
Judge put limits on Navy sonar use
A federal judge forbade the Navy on Thursday from using a powerful form of sonar within 12 miles of the California coast and slapped other restrictions on naval war exercises in a ruling that could have repercussions in the Pacific Northwest.
U.S. District Judge Florence Marie-Cooper said noise from the Navy's midfrequency sonar far outstrips levels at which federal rules require ear protection for humans on the job. Whales' hearing is extremely sensitive.
"The court is persuaded that the (protection) scheme proposed by the Navy is grossly inadequat...Read the full story