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Political power’s limits: The coal train reaction

originally published in The Herald

Truth and conventional wisdom don’t always align. In the debate over coal trains, two narratives merit a closer review. One involves the nature and limits of political power. The other centers on the inviolable railroads that built the American West.

Proponents of the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point have been vastly outnumbered at the scoping hearings on the proposal’s environmental impacts. Nevertheless, a mass of coal skeptics, minus local, environmental data, won’t derail an export facility. The mission of the scoping process is not to jawbone the wisdom of exporting American-subsidized coal to China and its contribution to climate change, nor is it a cumulative, comprehensive economic analysis to determine the net fallout to the Northwest.
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December 27, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Preparing for Cherry Point: The coal train reaction

originally published in The Herald

Railroads have powered the American West for more than a century, teasing out a mixed legacy. At an 1892 banquet at the Bayview Hotel, James J. Hill, coaxed by a rabble of city boosters, claimed that Everett would be the terminus for the Great Northern Railway. Seattle seized the prize the following year. Fickle and hidebound suitors, railroads are historically over-promising, vague and indispensable. It’s a narrative that should inform policymakers as Washington inches forward with a proposed coal-export facility at Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point near Bellingham.

Wednesday afternoon, a handful of legislators, running on post-Election Day fumes, convened a press conference at Seattle’s Pier 70 to spotlight Cherry Point. The cudgel is a Jan. 21 deadline to wrap up comments and public hearings for the scoping phase of the terminal’s environmental impact statement, with lawmakers concerned about the lack of state-agency coordination (and a couple Department of Ecology staffers laboring in a windowless office does not a comprehensive report make.)
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November 8, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Water fights: A proud son of Everett swings back at the latest insult, this one about how well Everett’s bottled water lies on the exquisite stomachs of upmarket urban booksellers.

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 28, 2011

On Wednesday one of Crosscut’s elderly editors asked me the distance between Everett and Spada Lake, the source of most of Snohomish County’s water. “It’s about 50 miles,” I said.

The editor paused, fixed in either deep thought or a nano nap. “So, pretty far from all of those pulp mills,” he said.

Please forgive Crosscut’s well-meaning, albeit senescent, nonagenarian editors. They’re still stuck back in college, when they donned raccoon coats and straw boaters and played “Yes, We Have no Bananas” on the ukulele. They recall hopping the Interurban up to Everett for speakeasy gin. Now Everett is simply that blue-collar speck “up there,” drive-through country on the way to the Vancouver Four Seasons. Sigh.

Among Seattle plutocrats, Everett remains a “hey, my contractor lives there!” place. The inference is clear: Some of my best roofers are Everettites, I just don’t want my daughter to marry one.

My Spada Lake exchange was in response to Peter Miller’s entertaining Crosscut blog. Miller, a renowned Seattle bookseller, links his stomach discomfort with drinking purified Everett tap water from Spada Lake.

Alas, the otherwise brilliant Miller lost me with his pusillanimous first sentence: “There is a bravery to eating and drinking what is put in front of you, a thankfulness and can-do spirit.” Hmmm. A bravery and can-do spirit to eating and drinking what’s put in front of you? Pray tell who is providing said food and drink, and where do I sign up? Not since Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” have such un-Everett sentiments been expressed.

Make no mistake: No one in Everett has ever had a problem eating what’s put in front of them and, just as relevant, no one has ever experienced a stomach ache. I repeat: Never. Whether drinking Spada Lake water or, more commonly, Jack Daniels, discomfort is not an option.

Miller’s dyspeptic message is best captured in the hypothetical headline: “Seattle Bookseller Gets a Tummy Ache from Drinking God-purified Water.” Instead an unnamed editor (let’s assign him/her a random pseudonym, “David Brewster”) titled it “Think Before you Drink.” Oh the humanity.

Can a clash of perspectives be reduced to a brand catchphrase? No, but let’s do it anyway: Per Olympia beer, “It’s the Water.”

July 28, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Conservation projects need congressional action

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 5, 2010

Congress should support full funding of conservation projects that are paid for by fees from offshore oil and gas leasing. 

“Lame duck” seems like a self-fulfilling label. With just two weeks left, this (sudden death? two-minute warning?) Congress should defy conventional wisdom and stick its bill out.

Thirty years ago, a lame-duck Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands and Conservation Act (ANILCA) the signal law that overnight doubled the size of the National Park System. ANILCA was the coda to an eye-smarting process that traces back to Alaska statehood in 1959.

In 1980 Democrats acted more emboldened than paralyzed by the end-of-session blues. The cudgel was a just-elected President Reagan, veto pen in hand. Deadlines sharpen the mind. Mostly.

The final days of our sudden-death Congress will revolve around tax cuts, online gambling and enough picayune dreck to make a fifth grader lose faith. One low-hanging bill with a bipartisan history, S2747, might stanch some of that cynicism. S2747 is the Senate counterpart to a House bill that passed last August to provide full and dedicated funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The Fund, established in 1965 as a bipartisan solution to benefit states and local communities with conservation and outdoor-recreation needs, is paid for using a portion of the receipts from offshore gas and oil leases (Read: BP and Exxon-Mobil help underwrite projects in places like the Yakima River Canyon and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest).

Over the past 40 years, LWCF projects have added up to more than a half-a-billion dollars for Washington state and goosed an outdoor recreation industry that annually adds $11.7 billion to the regional economy, according to the LWCF Coalition.

Let-no-fund-go-undiverted budgeting means that the LWCF’s authorized annual level of $900 million has only been met a couple of times since 1965. S2747, sponsored by New Mexico’s Sen. Jeff Bingaman and co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, will ensure the LWCF’s integrity and end the disconnect between mission and means. It has the power to appeal to Republican budget hawks and to conservation Democrats and, most critical of all, to a majority of Americans (77 percent, again according to the LWCF Coalition).

A lesson from 1980 is that history hates hangdogs. Passing S2747 should be easy, with one webbed foot in front of the other.

December 5, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Climate change comes to our National Parks

originally published on Crosscut.com

What does it mean for our national parks when magnum storms perennially wash out roads and curtail public access? At a small gathering at North Cascades National Park last week, sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association, user groups, National Parks and Forest Service pashas noodled the fallout of the climate elephant. It was a postlude to three severe, 100-year storms, bunched together over the last dozen years, that have walloped Washington’s three national parks.

The political rub: America’s gems lose their polish when there’s no one to take in the shine.

The crux of the climate challenge is zero sum. Park boosters know that it’s unsustainable to wring $50 million for repairs from the feds every couple of years. Lawmakers triage these budgets, and such decisions will fundamentally remake how Northwesterners look at their national parks.

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June 5, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , ,

A storm by any other name wouldn’t be as wet

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 19, 2007

What’s in a name? For one, the formerly elegant “Katrina” has been purged from those names-for-your-baby books (and “Pete,” alas, is reserved exclusively for three-legged dogs). That’s what’s in a name. All the more reason for The Seattle Times to revive its U.S Weather Service-sponsored name-that-storm competition. Discrimination is key. An apocalyptic squall coinciding with a religious holiday, such as last year’s Hanukkah Eve Storm, smacks of Godhead vengeance. (Which is why we read about the “Nisqually Earthquake of 2001” rather than the “Ash Wednesday Quake.”) No one except Viking pessimists welcomes the image of a bearded, linen-clad Jehovah with a lightening bolt in hand, which explains my reflexive imagining of a bearded, linen-clad Jehovah with a lightening bolt in hand. Forces greater than ourselves are tonic for government chauvinism. The fine art of storm naming can creep into political expression, and my first two suggestions are inherently political: (1) The Annual December Cataclysm and (2) The Annual Once-a-Millennium Flood. Climate change, anyone? A shrewder suggestion may be “The 21st Amendment Anniversary Flood.” This is slightly off – Dec. 5 marked the 74th anniversary of Prohibition’s repeal. Nevertheless, it advances civic education – which Constitutional Amendment was that again? We also receive a subconscious dose of God the Toll Taker: “You guys want wet, I’ll give you wet.” Which brings us, circuitously, to the 21st Amendment Anniversary Storm’s first responders. In Snohomish County, we have a Department of Emergency Management as well as a chapter of the American Red Cross. We also have a well regarded (prepare for a focus-grouped title) Department of “Surface Water Management.” The acronym, SWIM, is inspired, although managing surface water evokes images of a half-dozen CPAs strolling around with clipboards monitoring a Japanese Garden. What would George Orwell say? “… The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” If we throw these public servants a parade – and we should – we need to swap “SWIM” for “Flood Patrol.” We’ll all stand up and cheer for the Flood Patrol, and our late, disillusioned compatriot, George Orwell, would be thrilled.

December 19, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , , ,