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Clean water and public values: Draft Rule on Fish Consumption

originally published in The Herald

Beware Business Panic. It creates its own catechism that, repeated enough, is taken as gospel.

The latest example centers on Washington’s fish-consumption rate and the state’s update to human health water-quality standards. The pushback, expressed in behind-the-scenes arm-twisting and sky-is-falling letters to Gov. Jay Inslee, injects politics into basic science, with a business bottom line obscuring the public interest.

The controversy was flagged last year by journalist Robert McClure and InvestigateWest. For more than a decade, the Washington Department of Ecology knew it had to update its paltry fish consumption estimates ­— 6.5 grams a day (or three sardines, the operative metaphor.) The estimate is critical because it informs the acceptable level of carcinogenic discharge, specifically arsenic, mercury and PCBs. It’s an inverse relationship — low-ball consumption rates and ratchet up the permissible discharge of cancer-causing toxins.

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April 13, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Time for the hard questions: The Oso aftermath

originally published in The Herald

Thirty-four years ago, President Jimmy Carter asked Gov. Dixy Lee Ray what the federal government could do to help after the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Ray literally spelled it out.

“M-o-n-e-y,” she said.

Sunday’s visit by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate was an opportunity to survey the magnitude of the horror and underline the need for federal resources (see m-o-n-e-y, above.) Johnson said residents affected need to register with FEMA to qualify for federal assistance. Registering with the feds seems an unnatural reflex for the self-reliant souls of Darrington, Oso and Arlington. They should do it anyway.

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April 7, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , , , ,

Slow, deliberate steps forward: The Oso Aftermath

originally published in The Herald

Crisis reveals judgment. And few crises are as merciless and enduring as the Oso landslide.

The stories are almost too much to bear. As The Herald’s Gale Fiege writes, last week Arlington Mayor Barb Tolbert and Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin toured the devastation. A body was recovered, and after a few minutes the man they were chatting with quietly excused himself.

“I believe they have found my brother,” he said.

On Friday, volunteer firefighter Seth Jefferds stood with fellow firefighters in front of the Oso fire station on Highway 530. “I can’t tell you how tough it’s been and how tough it’s going to be.” Jefferds said. Jefferds’ wife, Christina, 45, and their granddaughter, Sanoah Violet Huestis, 4, were killed in the slide.

Generosity flows. Coastal Community Bank will forgive the home loans of those affected. Washington State University will waive tuition for the 2014-15 academic year for students caught in the fallout. The University of Washington will work with students though its financial aid office.

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April 6, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

The feds show their hand: Hanford Nuclear Reservation

originally published in The Herald

Attention to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation corresponds to its distance from Washington, D.C.’s political class. If Hanford and its 56 million gallons of highly radioactive crud sat on the Potomac and not the Columbia River, care and attention to its clean-up might be a wee more pronounced.

On Monday, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz met with Gov. Jay Inslee and state Attorney General Bob Ferguson to discuss the federal government’s revised clean-up proposal. Flying to Olympia with his department team, Moniz hoped to avoid triggering the 2010 Hanford Cleanup Consent Decree, a binding agreement that flows from a 2008 lawsuit. But bypassing the decree’s legal hammer requires delivering more than good intentions. After their meeting, the governor sounded underwhelmed.

“Unfortunately, the draft that was shown to us this morning did not contain the comprehensiveness and level of detail that the state has requested for months from our federal partners,” Inslee said in a statement.

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March 18, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Why politics must fall away: Climate Change Speech-athon

originally published in The Herald

Twenty-six years ago, then-Sen. Bennett Johnston, a conservative Democrat from Louisiana and the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, made a prescient observation.

“We must examine and assess the dangers of global warming caused by the greenhouse effect that actually threaten human survival within the century, requiring even more stringent energy efficiencies and conservation,” Johnston wrote.

A second decade into a new century and with climate change manifesting in tangible, ominous ways, it’s deja vu all over again.

“We know that rising sea levels threaten Seattle and ports throughout my state critical to our economy,” Sen. Patty Murray said on the Senate floor this week. “We see them in our rural communities facing longer-lasting and more severe droughts that wither crops and turn our forests into kindling for wildfires.”

Murray, along with 29 Democratic colleagues including fellow Washingtonian Sen. Maria Cantwell and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, participated in a 14-hour speech-athon on the Senate floor Monday and Tuesday to underscore the threat of climate change. It was a sobering rundown of real-world outcomes that are disrupting Northwest industries, including shellfish die-offs spurred by climate-related ocean acidification.

“Ocean acidification is an economic issue,” Cantwell said. “We have generations of shellfish growers that are threatened now by the impacts of carbon in our oceans and the warming of our oceans.”

The future is now. The Vancouver Sun reports that 10 million scallops near Qualicum Beach died this year because of ocean acidity.

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March 13, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

As railroads replace pipelines: Bakken Crude Oil Shipments

originally published in The Herald

Life felt simpler when North Dakota was known primarily for ice fishing, Lawrence Welk and the Norsk Hostfest in Minot. Today, crude oil beneath the Bakken formation in western North Dakota has rejuvenated the state’s economy and driven down unemployment to the lowest in the country at 3.1 percent.

The trouble with Bakken crude (disregard its carbon footprint and the mess of hydraulic fracking for now) is that it’s highly flammable. The 2013 derailment of an oil train in Quebec and attendant inferno that killed 47 people brought into focus the perils of rail transport, particularly with older “DOT-111” tank cars. These aging carriers — around 80,000 are in use — are more likely to puncture than newer tank cars with sturdier hulls.

Bakken crude is an everyday feature of the Northwest landscape. Washington is the fifth-largest refining state in the U.S.

Shipments of Bakken crude into the Pacific Northwest began with zero fanfare two years ago, the Sightline Institute’s Eric de Place writes in an institute report, “The Northwest’s Pipeline By Rails.”

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March 10, 2014 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Hitching to conservation: Negotiating landscapes

originally published in The Herald

Politics can be an ecosystem, a social science version of John Muir’s, “anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The Yakima River Basin Integrated Water Resource Management Plan is a $5 billion, 30-year mega-project that defines “integrated,” with multiple gears and political interests. Tug on one part, and we find it hitched to everything else.

The purchase of 50,000 acres in the Teanaway drainage from American Forest Holdings, LLC, earlier this month was a tangible step forward in protecting the Yakima River watershed. The land includes water rights that predate 1905, when the federal government received title to everything that hadn’t yet been privately claimed. As Gov. Jay Inslee notes, healthy management of the watershed will enhance water supply and quality as well as preserve sources of cold-water habitat for fish.

The Teanaway purchase is a standalone win for Washington. Curiously, the heart of the project — water storage for irrigation, fish and domestic-use — flows from failure. In 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation opted for a “no action” recommendation after concluding a four-year, $16 million research study on Yakima basin storage. The plan’s centerpiece was the Black Rock reservoir, priced at $7.7 billion. The project didn’t pass the cost-benefit test — coming in at 13 cents for every dollar invested — and supporters regrouped. For four years, the Yakima Working Group, under the rubric of the Washington Department of Ecology and USBR, has been fine-tuning the plan.

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August 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The fierce politics of water: Negotiating landscapes

originally published in The Herald

On Friday, the Washington Board of Natural Resources unanimously voted in favor of one of the largest private land acquisitions in Northwest history.

It’s an agreement that teases out a long narrative on water politics, interest-group horse-trading and the federal government’s role in the 21st century West.

In June, the Legislature approved $99 million from the capital budget to purchase 50,000 acres of the Teanaway River Valley north of Cle Elum. Forterra, a land conservation group, working in concert with the state, negotiated the agreement with the willing seller, American Forest Holdings, LLC.

The Teanaway sale will protect the river valley’s headwaters as well as the Yakima Basin watershed. In public lands parlance, it’s a “working landscape,” with recreational, livestock grazing and partially logged forestland.
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August 4, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Coal trains are poor policy: The coal-train reaction

originally published in The Herald

A long-view of coal-export facilities weaves together who is paying for what, the spectrum of environmental impacts, and forecasting where the country will be a generation from now.

But politics are rarely hitched to a long view of history.

For lawmakers, coal trains should be a crucible, a decision unadulterated by electoral or labor politics. Silence or “on the other hand” posturing doesn’t cut it.

Simply put, is this something Washington would like to be known for 20 years from now? A 21st century economy driven by aerospace, agriculture, and coal-export terminals?

No, but as George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

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April 21, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Why coal royalties matter: The coal-train reaction

originally published in The Herald

The paradox of the American West is the terrible beauty of a landscape largely owned and managed by the feds, nourishing a population of independent spirits skeptical of big government. Eastern Washington is emblematic of the bite-the-hand contradiction, home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and beneficiary of Depression-era public works projects that made the high Columbia desert bloom. Love for the feds? Not so much.

Cross federal lands with private enterprise and a bureaucratic culture sensitive to criticism, and the resulting appetizer serves up the challenge of coal terminals.

Last week, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the committee’s ranking Republican, sent a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar demanding specifics on the management of federal coal royalties. Their questions flow from a series of Reuters articles detailing the loss of millions of dollars from coal mined on federal land in the Powder River Basin. Presupposing that the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point is green-lighted, the basin is the starting point for coal on its way to East Asia via rail.

The possible loss of revenue also costs states where federal coal is mined, specifically Wyoming and Montana. In 2011, Montana and Wyoming exported nearly 18 million tons of coal. Wyoming’s Republican Gov. Matt Mead and Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer are working to ensure that citizens get a fair return on investment.

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January 8, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,