UPDATE: Holy Father the Chemist

Pope Francis

Pope Francis and His Little Fiat - The New Yorker


Transcript: Pope Francis’s speech at the White House 

Transcript: Pope Francis's speech to Congress 


There have been some strange twists and turns in religiosity the past few weeks perhaps foreshadowing Pope Francis’ visit to our country this week. No doubt Kentucky county auditor Kim Davis is both deeply religious and an upstanding civil servant but not to choose one’s religious faith and resign from one’s sworn duties as a civil servant when it comes in conflict makes a mockery of both the faith she holds and the duties of the office she had sworn to perform.

The trouble with people like Kim Davis invoking their belief in God as the final argument is that it ends civil discourse. It’s like saying the spirit gods of the ancient forest say clear cutting is bad. You can say it and believe it but It’s awfully hard to have a discussion about the pros and cons of clear cutting with you.

Around the time the Kim Davis circus was in high gear, there was a report about a study that found that people who live in beautiful places are more likely to have lower rates of religious adherence. ( Live In A Beautiful Region? You're Less Likely To Be Religious ) A modest proposal would have been to invite Ms. Davis to this side of the Cascades and let her chill a bit. But that’s not the way religiosity works itself out.

You’d think a rich and smart man like Ben Carson who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination would have spent time in beautiful places with trees, lakes and mountains but it certainly didn’t affect his heart or his brain when he wears his Christian faith on his sleeve and declares that no one who believes in the Muslim faith should be president of the Unites States. Because being a Muslim is not consistent with the Constitution of the United States. Whereas Kim Davis who is a Christian is of a faith that is consistent with the constitution of the United States. But she will not, due to her Christian faith, uphold the laws under the constitution of the Unites States.

See how complicated it gets when folks get religiosity and civics mixed up?

Then, again, I still remember the national discussion when John F. Kennedy ran for president and whether a Catholic (presumably with a hotline to Rome) should be in the White House. Some folks even had qualms about Mitt Romney, a Morman, possibly becoming president but maybe that was because of the underwear thing.

At a dinner this past weekend, I said that, when Pope Francis comes to this country, he will be talking to politicians about climate change and social justice and probably invoking God the same way Kim Davis invokes God as the final authority. Makes talking about climate change hard when you invoke God, I said.

No, my dinner host said, Francis is a chemist.

(According to Thomas Reese, “Pope Francis studied chemistry and worked as a chemist prior to entering the seminary. But Jorge Bergoglio never graduated from university prior to entering the seminary. What he did do was graduate with a título in chemistry from the Escuela Técnica Industrial No. 12*, which is a state-run technical secondary school.” Does Pope Francis have a master's degree in chemistry? )

So, I said, as long as he speaks to climate change as a chemist and in terms of sciene, he won’t be like Kim Davis and those religious fanatics?

True, and that’s great. I look forward to hearing and cheering on the Holy Father the Chemist.

[See: Pope Francis’s Environmental Encyclical: 13 Things to Know and Share  (Catholic Answers)]

[If you’d like to taste an example of being spiritual in telling stories based on chemistry and not invoking God, check out Primo Levi’s book, The Periodic Table.]

--Mike Sato

Heat and Drought. Is This The New Northwest?

Sockeye salmon (Barry Sweet/AP)

Some summer: Consecutive days of record high temperatures, little rain and low river runoff, rising water temperatures in rivers and Puget Sound... You staying or planning to leave?

In the environmental organizing business we talk about events like oil spills or fish kills or finding toxic chemicals in breast milk as “wake-up” calls that could be communicated in a way that would move people from awareness to action.  In many cases, like a one-day sale, it worked in the short term but could not be sustained in a longer campaign.

You might or might not find the science of climate change compelling but you have to admit if you’ve been here awhile that this isn’t the Northwest that we thought we knew. Maybe next month enough rain will fall and temperatures will moderate so rivers will flow again for returning salmon and toxic algae will dissipate when Puget Sound’s temperature drops. Might even be able to forget about this summer and return to our lives as usual.

That’s human and understandable, and that’s what we’ve been doing for years about carbon emissions and the decline in Puget Sound’s health. Wake up to a crisis event, then go back to our lives as usual. Our government has done it for years, lurching forward and backwards in gridlock.

Last weekend we entertained family from out of town and drove to dinner and plays in Seattle and Skagit County round trip from Bellingham. There was no way those trips could be done on a mass transit schedule and for now, the most rational alternative was to fill up the tank with gas and drive. One day, some day but not today, owning and driving an electric- or hydrogen-powered vehicle or taking mass transit will be a reasonable alternative.

Last month I answered the door and chatted with a young lady working for Puget Sound Energy promoting their Green Power program where, for a few extra dollars each month, I would be buying and using non-fossil fuel generated electricity. I asked her how selling the virtues of the Green Power program jibed with Puget Sound Energy’s Energize Eastside project  which proposes to construct a new transmission line on the east side of Lake Washington so the utility can sell its dirty Colstrip coal power outside the state. I got a polite smile from the young lady and a promise that she would look into it.

My neighbor David this summer had solar panels installed and is rightly proud of the amount of solar energy he is collecting. On a trip to Hawaii this summer, I saw solar panels galore on rooftops; the main problem was the bottleneck created by the local utility’s footdragging in buying back energy generated by individual households.

One day, some day but not today, I’ll have an affordable solar array and wind turbine system with battery storage so Puget Sound Energy is an energy partner rather than an energy purveyor.  One day, some day but not today, there will be rational alternatives that enough people can partake in to reduce individual carbon footprints in a way that makes a difference in moderating climate change.

But why not today? Bill McKibben in a June 29 New Yorker article “Power To The People” finds hope in the results of the energy make-over done for Mark and Sara Borkowski in Vermont. “The numbers reveal a sudden new truth—that innovative, energy-saving and energy-producing technology is now cheap enough for everyday use,” McKibben writes. The take-away? “Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.”

One of the early slogans in protecting Puget Sound was, “We all live downstream,” meaning the rain that falls in the Puget Sound basin ends up in Puget Sound. This summer wake-up call is that life in the Sound is stressed by low water flows in the rivers and by higher water temperatures. Dead zones due to oxygen depletion, early shellfish harvest closures, toxic algae, fish kills... (‘The Blob’ may warm Puget Sound’s waters, hurt marine life )

This summer’s stress brings to the fore many of the problems of Puget Sound’s health discussed and grappled with mixed success for at least the last 30 years. We now have another in a series of wake-up calls like the past discovery of liver lesions in English sole, an early morning oil spill in the fog, sea star wasting disease, death of an endangered orca whale... After all these years, do you need another wake-up call about the declining health of Puget Sound?

Another wake-up call can’t hurt but the problem is that there really isn’t anything I can do about dead zones or toxic algae or fish kills or liver lesions or ships spilling oil or shellfish disease or a dead orca. I can pick up dog poop and recycle and conserve water but those, honestly, are nice-to-do actions that have very little to do with the real problems of Puget Sound’s declining health. Someone once angrily said in a meeting, “People are the problem with Puget Sound.” I don’t think so. We just haven’t figured out where we fit in solving the equation of Puget Sound’s health.

The state’s Puget Sound recovery goals now include measurements for human well-being and human values in considering the Sound’s resources. ( Healthier Puget Sound depends on healthy people, report finds ) These human values, the result of scientific research, are meant to help determine how money and effort are spent in Puget Sound recovery. If you fix those things people value most, people will be happier. I might be missing something but I’m not sure this puts us any closer to knowing how I will be meaningfully engaged in actions that result in fixing the problem I think most important to fix.

One day, some day but not today, there will be reasonable and meaningful alternatives that I can take to reduce my carbon footprint from my transport and my energy use. One day, some day but not today, there will be reasonable and meaningful actions I can take to remedy the real problems of Puget Sound’s health. One day, some day but not today, my actions and your actions will be measured in a way that shows the power of acting in concert. Until that day comes, there will continue to be wake-up calls that will echo and pass over us as we go back to our lives as usual.

--Mike Sato

Commencement 2014: Thinking About What Sally Jewell Didn’t Say At Whitman College

Commencement 2014, Whitman College

First, a loud shout out to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell for a fine commencement address at Whitman College’s commencement this past Sunday. She talked salmon and she talked about and quoted Billy Frank, Jr., who is on his way to an iconic, mythic stature. I just hope the graduates really listened and heard Billy’s words.

She saluted past Whitman graduates from the Class of 1964, who had returned for a 50th reunion, and she looked forward to the time when the Class of 2014 would be returning for its 50th year reunion in 2064.

Heady stuff, commencement addresses. I applauded when Sally urged graduates to tackle the hard, complex issue of climate change both on the big policy level and in their everyday lives. I hoped parents, grandparents and friends also really listened and heard her.

I was coming off a week’s high having learned that President Obama had used his executive authority under the Antiquities Act and designated 500,000 acres of New Mexico public lands as the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. [Obama names New Mexico monument, says ‘I’m not finished’]

One parent asked me whether I though anyone was going to show up to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. No one did. I spoke with another parent and we hailed the building momentum for removing dams on our rivers. When we parted, she said she loved the speech and what Sally brought to Interior but just wished she and Obama would come to grips with oil and gas exploration on public lands.

After commencement and the festivities, I didn’t think about what Sally Jewell had said until trying to return to Puget Sound via Interstate 90 on Memorial Day afternoon and sitting and crawling westward in two lanes of vehicle traffic from Ellensburg to near the Snoqualmie Pass summit. I don’t usually drive and sit in rush hour traffic so travel like Monday’s gave me a lot of time to think about the irony of living in the 21st century in our Washington and the United States.

Grandchild is in the back seat amusing herself with a game on the hand-held device connected to the internet. I can look on the WDOT web site to see that the road ahead is bright red, indicating we will be in line for a long, long time. Our families are sitting in three different vehicles crammed full of luggage and household goods cleared out from the graduate’s rental and we’re calling and texting each other about the traffic jam.

Communication-wise, we are traveling at the speed of light. Our petroleum-based technology and infrastructure, however, are still somewhere in the mid-20th Century.

That’s what Sally Jewell didn’t talk about on Sunday. She didn’t tell us that on Monday we’d be returning to Bellingham, Ashland, Corvallis and Bellevue from Walla Walla in a clunky, outmoded fashion that would stand as the real challenge to not only meeting the dangers of climate change but also the decline of America’s competitiveness and productivity.

Build me a way to get around without a car safely, conveniently and economically and I’ll use it. Set up a live and interactive video stream that captures important events like commencements and I’ll log on. Reduce and eliminate the sources of carbon emissions and draw the line at extracting carbon out of the ground and maybe, maybe the Class of 2014 and the grandkid playing on the hand-held in the back seat will be around for the commencement address in Walla Walla in 2064.

--Mike Sato

Antarctic Ice Melting is So Scary We Need A Laugh

Melting ice lifts all floes

News that a part of the the West Antarctic ice sheet is not only in the process of falling off but also there’s nothing much that can be done to stop the process is pretty grim news. Anybody got something funny to say about that? [ UW researchers: Polar ice sheet doomed, but how soon? ]

Whether the world’s seas rise four or 12 feet depends on how long it takes for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet to fall into the ocean and how long that takes depends on how much we humans do to stop the warming process of the earth. The faster the earth warms, the faster the ice melts, get it?

Said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist, “[T]he longer it gets drawn out, the more time people will have to move inland.”

Said Benjamin Smith, who works with Joughin, “While we may not be able to prevent [ocean levels] from rising in the long run, we could make it a whole lot worse.”

Bill McKibbon shows up in Bellingham this week and I wonder how many jokes he’s going to tell? Environmentalists as a rule are a terribly serious bunch and seeing the earth of our children and their children crashing, burning and going down the toilet is no laughing matter.

The poisons will kill you, though, unless we laugh.

Well, check out Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Climate Change Debate

Moved some of those poisons out? Feel better?

There’s lots of material out there to riff on:

Upset ocean? Tums turum tum. Kilmer calls for competition to reduce ocean acidity

Remember McGruff? Meet McPoop. Dogs sniff out bacteria contamination in Kirkland waterways

C’mon, give it a try.

--Mike Sato

Watching Starfish Waste Away

Wasted starfish (PHOTO: Nate Fletcher)

(Bellingham) Those of us who might have wanted Dr. Ben Miner of Western Washington University to identify the mysterious disease that is killing starfish along the Pacific West Coast would have left his talk last Tuesday sadly unsatisfied after an hour or so. Real life and death isn’t like an hour’s episode of CSI. As with all good, rigorous science, establishing what isn’t the cause is as important as hypothesizing what might be the cause.

The mass die-off has received ample media coverage from last fall through this winter. [See: Mysterious epidemic devastates starfish population off the Pacific Coast  and Northwest Starfish Experiments Give Scientists Clues To Mysterious Mass Die-offs]

The mass die-offs of certain species like sunflower, mottled and ocher starfish which develop lesions and rapidly disintegrate had been first reported last summer on the Olympic coast, followed by reports from hardest hit areas like Seattle, Vancouver BC, Monterey, Santa Barbara and Long Beach CA. As observed, adult starfish, according to Ben Miner, prove much more susceptible than juveniles. The rate of die-offs slowed from the fall into the winter. In Puget Sound, the disease has moved through starfish populations from Seattle north to Mukilteo and to Langley and Keystone on Whidbey Island.

What is and isn’t known at this time:

Experiments demonstrate that the cause is a pathogen transmitted from infected starfish to healthy ones and not an environmental toxin or parasite which would affect other starfish species and other marine life. The pathogen is water borne and affects starfish in aquariums and marine laboratories; starfish in filtered aquarium water show no signs of infection.

The pathogen may be bacterial or viral, like the parvo virus which causes tissue degeneration but experiments have not proven definitive. Shooting up an infected starfish with antibiotic stops the infection but the starfish dies when the treatment stops. All starfish don’t get infected and die, which may mean that some starfish have an immune capability or a combination of environmental factors are at play that result in infection and death. (Shooting up a Crown of Thorns starfish with bacteria in an unrelated experiment showed a fatal effect resembling wasting disease.)

“If it were straightforward, you’d have got it already,” Miner said. Like bee disease and colony collapse, there may be multiple factors that increase organism stress and suppress immune systems. What makes the starfish sick may be gone by the time it dies. If there remains uninfected areas where healthy and unhealthy starfish can be studied, there’s a chance the mystery might be solved. If wasting disease spreads everywhere, there won’t be anything left to study.
Looking ahead:

 One consequence of the mass die-off is changes in ecological balance in certain areas. The starfish around marine reserves have traditionally feasted on lingcod eggs. With the absence of starfish predators, lingcod are expected to thrive. The effect of increased predation by lingcod on other species will be interesting to see.

The environmental factors associated with wasting disease may be related to conditions found in populated and protected areas where die-offs have been highest. The die-offs have slowed during the winter, indicating a possible correlation with climate and water temperature. Likewise, the reports from past die-off episodes in California and Baja waters have been associated with El Nino years and warmer waters in the late ‘70s, early and late ‘80s, and the ‘90s. Alas, NOAA predicts an El Nino year for 2014-15 and, as Eric Holthaus in Slate sees it, “Seattle: A warm winter, and especially warm waters offshore, could be tough for the Pacific Northwest salmon.” [What Does El Niño Mean for Me?]

Might be worse for our starfish. As the spring and summer arrive, watch carefully.

[Oh, regarding radioactivity from Fukushima to blame, not. The timing is wrong, only some species of starfish are wasting, and there are no other marine critters showing radioactivity effects.]

For complete up-to-date reports and maps and images of the disease, go to the UC Santa Cruz wasting site.

--Mike Sato

Puzzling Over Saving the Earth

Help me puzzle out where we are heading on this annual celebration of Earth Day.

It hasn’t helped to have read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction earlier this month. From a scientific point of view, it looks pretty clear that continuing as we are on our highway of carbon emissions, we are driving to an end much of life as we know it.

I try not to despair since much of my job is to inform people about saving the land, waters and critters. I’d like to get up and believe every day is Earth Day or at least to believe, as reporter Gary Chittim at KING5 tweeted this morning, “On Earth Day; the movement toward a healthier earth keeps rolling along through the mud of skepticism by finding traction in common sense.”

That’s good, if it were true and helps you get up in the morning. But for many people common sense would say the earth is still the center of the universe and, if asked to choose between the accounts of the beginning of the universe given by Carl Sagan and Neal DeGrasse Tyson and Genesis, would say they didn’t know or opt for the Good Book’s version. [Poll: Big Bang a big question for most American]

Common sense, based on keen observation and experience, is smart. Common sense, based on custom and prejudice, is ignorant.

If global warming and ocean acidification aren’t real to you this Earth Day, how can you take seriously the 101 ways to save our planet?

Two-and-a-half years ago I lost my job and our household’s monthly gasoline bills dropped since I was not driving up and down the freeways. The car we drive now is almost twice as fuel efficient as the one before and, I am fascinated by the dashboard feature that measures my fuel efficiency in real time while driving. That’s the same fascination I have when I encounter those radar-activated traffic displays on city streets telling you how fast you are going. Drive steady; whoa, slow down...

I’m also hooked on taking my daily blood pressure, imagining the the fragrances on the tropical breeze, the rustling of the coconut fronds while the cuff constricts and slowly releases. What have I been eating, I wonder, when the reading is higher; what are you upset about? Whoa, slow down, take some deep breaths; try the reading again...

My ongoing skepticism on Earth Day and every day is that we are told to do things to reverse the bad things with no appreciable result we can see. Picking up litter or dog doo isn’t going to save the planet. The only results we learn about are the negative effects of increased carbon in the atmosphere and in our waters.

Gasoline prices in Puget Sound are now hitting the oil companies’ springtime bargain of $4 a gallon. [Whatcom County gas prices closing in on $4 a gallon] However, for many there is no connection between the miles driven and the boom in Salish Sea oil and fuel transport by tanker, train and pipeline— and the steady increase of carbon in our air and waters. [Surging oil traffic puts region at risk]

What’s the feedback mechanism in real time that will allow us to see how modifying our everyday actions will affect the health of the planet? What will shows us in real time how our everyday actions relate to larger issues and actions, the same way driving for fuel efficiency and speed limits can tell us about oil exports, climate change and public safety, the way taking one’s blood pressure and weight can tell us about medication, diet and exercise?

Unless we get to that point on Earth Day and every day, science will always lose to custom and prejudice. Unless we can show that we and our world are irrevocably connected, we and the world lose.

But sometimes the feedback mechanism is as simple as hearing once what you will always recall: Bill Frank, Jr. is said to have pointed to the overhead lights in a meeting room and said, “You know what I see in those lights? Dead salmon.” Since I heard that, I always think about salmon when turning off lights not in use.

And, as a palliative to The Sixth Extinction, I read the last chapter of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table where he describes several incarnations of a carbon atom through the webs of space, time and life. The elements, thank goodness, are eternal.

--Mike Sato

When Good Beaches Go Bad

Bolstering an eroding bank (Star-Advertiser)

The forecast for Wednesday is 10- to 12-foot surf on the north shore of Oahu and what the ocean brings in as sand it takes away and brings back again. But sometimes it doesn’t and, on an island in the middle of the Pacific where the sea is just feet away, shoreline erosion has brought desperate measures at Sunset Beach’s Rocky Point on the north shore where the shoreline is eroding and the sea threatens houses.

Since last fall, high surf during unusually high tides have eroded yards, trees and pool decks into the sea. Just after New Year’s Day, city crews cleared debris off the beach at Sunset and homeowners took stopgap measures to staunch the erosion. The sea will put back some of the shoreline’s sand but nobody knows how bad the damage might be from the next high surf and high tide.

In a marginally unrelated occurrence, the recently-completed $2.4 million beach restoration program has required additional fixes after what was determined to be unusual currents eroded a stretch of the restored beach. (See What’s An Island Beach Without Sand?)

Last week, state lawmakers heard from scientists that climate change will drive sea level rise which will result in more and more coastal erosion and flooding incidents.

Referring to the Sunset Beach and Waikiki erosion, Dolan Eversole of NOAA told lawmakers, "Perhaps it's a glimpse into our not-so-distant future.” Eversole said a general estimate on sea-level rise is 1 foot by 2050 and 1 meter, or 3.28 feet, by 2100 but, “I think those numbers are on the low end for Hawaii.”

Representative Chris Lee is preparing to introduce legislation to require the state to better prepare for the potential impacts of climate change on Hawaii. "If we lose our beaches, we lose our economy and we lose our way of life here," Lee said.

But adapting to sea level rise will require changes in land use and construction standards— and making hard decisions on which beaches are priority areas to protect.

You can’t build a wall around everything. "There are a variety of places around the state where you can draw a line and say we are absolutely not going to allow any armoring because, as you know, it's a domino effect,” said Eversole. “As soon as you build one (sea) wall, it affects the neighbors."

And Nature in the end will have the last say.

--Mike Sato

Coal: “I Owe My Soul To The Company Store”

I grew up in Hawaii with no idea what I was singing about when rumbling along with Tennessee Ernie Ford in my deepest pre-teen bass voice to the lyrics of Sixteen Tons--

"You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"

I still don’t have much of a first-hand experience with coal except for seeing some in a dusty basement in an old Portland rental. I’ve watched How Green Was My Valley and Coal Miner’s Daughter and used the expression “canary in a coal mine.”

I’ve heard of the somewhat surreal story by Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal, and pondered whether children in Europe who got a lump of coal at Christmastime were being punished or rewarded. On one hand, the Dutch tradition was punishment for bad behavior; on the other, coal was a valuable fuel that warmed you. Maybe punishment or reward depended on whether you were rich or poor.


This past week we had to think about the implications of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deciding that effects of climate change would not be included in the scope of the environmental impact study for the coal export facility proposed to be built in the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve and pondered the implications of the multi-pronged avenues of the President’s policy to reduce the impacts of coal burning on climate change.

On the one hand we aren’t going to assess the impact on climate change of a major action regarding coal; on the other hand, we are going to take action on the impact on climate change by reducing how we and the rest of the world uses coal.

I was reminded that decision like the one announced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were long in the making and made at the highest levels of the Administration. In late February of this year, Bloomberg News reported in White House CEQ Meetings on Coal Projects Seen Indicating Major Policy Issues at Stake:

The White House Council on Environmental Quality has convened a series of meetings with federal regulators over the past nine months as the Obama administration shapes environmental impact analyses for the building of terminals to export coal to Asia. While CEQ downplays its involvement in the deliberations, a former CEQ official and other analysts suggest the White House role highlights the sensitive policy issues at stake, as the administration is under pressure to assess the possible climate change impact of burning U.S. coal in Asia.

At issue is how broadly the government should extend its analysis: whether to consider the impacts of each of the Pacific Northwest export terminals through narrowly tailored individual environmental impact statements or to assess their cumulative effects together, which would allow for a comprehensive analysis of possible climate change impacts.

Trains carrying coal north to British Columbia are the closest those of us in Western Washington get to coal these days. I think it would help make talking about coal much more real if, every time someone wanted to say something pro or con about coal, they had to hold a piece of coal in their hands. Sort of like a talking stick.

This past week, I suggested to an activist organizer she could use coal in a more tactile way but there was no easy way short of derailing one of those coal trains to get some coal to have and to hold. But we have Eocene rock formations in Western Washington out of which coal has been mined, giving us names like Coal Creek, Newcastle and Black Diamond.

I asked geologist Dan McShane if he’d written about the coal in his blog, Reading the Washington Landscape, and Dan generously shared some of the articles he’d written.

Dan’s article, Park Store - Sometimes Zoning Does Not Matter tells of, among other things, the 1890 opening of the Blue Canyon Mine located above the east shore of Lake Whatcom. The high-quality coal was barged to the north end of the lake, then sent by rail to ships on the Bellingham waterfront.

Coal in Whatcom County: Glen Echo Mine tells of the 1918 opening of the Glen Echo Mine on Anderson Creek.

Dan writes about coal mined in the 1870s in downtown Bellingham in A Patch Over Bellingham's Void and near the Bellingham Golf Course in When Bellingham Had Coal Piles.

Bellingham and Whatcom County’s coal, as well as King County’s coal, was small potatoes compared to the amount of coal coming via locomotives whose lights we see coming our way in the dark tunnel. There are a lot of folks more than happy to owe their souls to the company.

Me? I don’t sing Tennessee Ernie’s song any more. Nowadays, I think about who wins and who loses. Anytime I need to be reminded, it's time to listen up to John Prine singing Paradise --

And daddy won't you take me back to Mulenberg county
Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay
Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in askin'
Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

--Mike Sato


(Note: Eric de Place at Sightline gives some real scary numbers about the amount of oil coming our way by rail, What You Can Do About Oil-By-Rail in the Northwest, to go along with my earlier blog, Greased Rails for Oil and Coal )

Drinking Ocean Acid

(NOAA)

I’m going to the workshop in Bellingham this evening at the Cruise Terminal to hear local experts talk about ocean acidification. I don’t expect to come home feeling very cheerful.

I’ve read the guest editorial written by Northwest Straits Commission executive director Ginny Broadhurst and Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish Farms in the Bellingham Herald,  Threatened Puget Sound marine life shows global threat of ocean acidification.  The guest editorial a good primer on why the changing chemistry of the oceans and Puget Sound is a very serious matter for life as we know it.

A blue-ribbon Washington State Panel on Ocean Acidification last November issued its report and 42 recommended actions. Alas, the guest editorialists write: “The panel recognized that we can do little here in Washington to directly reduce the 70 million tons of carbon dioxide that the world pumps into the atmosphere every day.”

Saying that kind of stuff is exactly what will make me come home feeling glum— because there is at least one thing we can do here in Washington: disallow the shipping of U.S. coal to overseas markets. Here's a second: Stand with Oregon to close their ports to coal export as well. And a third: Work with British Columbia to limit their export capacity as well.

The 800-pound gorilla of proposed coal export facilities was staring the blue ribbon panel in the face when they made their recommendations— and they blinked. Maybe Governor Inslee in working with Governor Kitzhaber will go further with the White House on nixing coal exports.   The state Senate majority? If they want to drink climate change skeptic Don Easterbrook’s Kool-Aid, let ‘em.  I think they’ll find it filled with ocean acid.

See you at the Cruise Terminal at 6 pm.

--Mike Sato

Working Animals, or, Do Animals Work (For Causes)?

The Environmental Priorities Coalition last week sent out an action alert asking activists to tell the state Fish and Wildlife Commission to approve the state’s Wolf Conservation and Management Plan. Kerry McHugh who sent out the alert said that the response was one of the best she’s seen. “Wolves are a lightening rod,” she said.

Jo Bailey sent a video link this morning showing a humpback whale rescue in the Sea of Cortez. The subject line said: Humpback Whale gives show after being freed. WATCH THIS!!! Of course, I watched it. It was awesome; made me thankful for the Earth Island Institute’s Great Whale Conservancy.

From past experience I’ve seen Facebook posts and Twitter feeds featuring whales, bears and wolves rack up the hits— while links to policy and politics issues languish. Animals, it seems, are no-brainer attention-getters when it comes to getting your advocacy message up front.

Does the polar bear on the Arctic ice floe ‘work’?

Atlantic senior editor Alexis Madrigal raises an thoughtful point in his blog Fighting Climate Change Is Not About Environmentalism   He contended earlier that President Obama should say that stopping global warming isn’t about nature or ‘saving the planet’ because some kinds of plants and animals will survive but it’s human infrastructure that’s at risk. “We’ve built cities predicated on one climate and now those places have a new one. Climactic chaos is expensive,” he wrote. Life survives because ecosystems, even those stressed by rising temperatures, are resilient.

But: “Human-built environments, on the other hand, are very efficient and very brittle. They function best in a very narrow set of temperature and precipitation conditions....Now start fiddling with the climate of the place. Most of the time things are fine, but when you hit an extreme that you don't normally (floods, snow, heat, etc), stuff starts to go haywire. The infrastructure you built is encountering conditions it wasn't designed to withstand. And so it breaks.

“Somehow polar bears became the charismatic emblem of what was wrong with global warming; I think we should have made it a mayor instead.”

-Mike Sato