Daily Score Blog

In a recent interview, Joe Lucas, spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was asked if he thought coal was contributing to global warming. He said: "I don't know. I'm not a scientist."

Well, he's no scientist, but the ACCCE has spent over $10.5 million on energy lobbying.

  -- commissioned a TV ad by the Coen Brothers to get the word out that coal is dirty no matter how many times you call it clean.

It's right up there with our own Eric de Place's dream of magic clean coal unicorns flying in to rescue us from global warming. In other words: not gonna happen.

"Food deserts" are places in urban areas where people have limited access to healthy, fresh, and reasonably-priced food. The only options are hard-bitten markets where you can find cigarettes, cheap beer, and packaged snack foods, but nothing like apples, pasta, or milk. In Portland and Seattle, food deserts tend to be in low-income neighborhoods or suburbs where many residents rely on transit service or foot-power. (Think parts of northeast Portland or Seattle's South Park, for example.)

Without ready access to decent grocery stores, residents end up over-spending, or buying food with limited nutritional value, or both. Fresh fruits and vegetables -- so important for a healthy diet -- are in short supply, if they exist at all. And you can forget about local and organic food. So food deserts can result in poor health, tight budgets for those who can least afford it, or long cumbersome bus trips to other neighborhoods. Worse, the problem of grocery access is most severe for the elderly, single parents, and the disabled. It's not just an urban land use issue: it's a problem with profound social justice implications.

To date, there haven't been many satisfactory solutions. It's tough to get grocers to locate to low-income neighborhoods for basic economic reasons. Compounding matters, perverse zoning laws and misguided advocacy often restrict or prevent the large-scale commercial development grocery stores look for. In recent years, some neighborhood activists have championed weekly farmer's markets, backyard gardens, or city "pea patches." For all the merit these local food ideas have, they're patchwork solutions that can't provide year-round reliable groceries to people with limited time and income. But there may yet be a solution at hand.

State officials expect that climate change will create some profound water supply problems in eastern Washington.  But there’s a potential solution that’s not only cheap, but also cute and furry: beavers.

Here’s the problem:  according to climate scientists, warmer temperatures are already melting mountain snows earlier in the spring.  That leaves streams and rivers short on water in mid-summer, just when salmon, farms, and homes really need it.  Scientists expect that, as winter temperatures in the Northwest rise, the state's summertime water shortages will only get worse.  (The preamble in this state Executive Order has a nice, succinct rundown of the impacts of climate change that the state has already experienced.)

To start dealing with the state's slow-moving water crisis, Governor Gregoire asked the state ecology department to find ways to store more spring runoff.  And, perhaps predictably, the department came back with some big, costly, and capital-intensive ideas:   dams on Hawk Creek (pictured), Sand Hollow, and Crab Creek, three canyon tributaries to the Columbia River.  Under the proposal, the state could pump spring snowmelt into reservoirs behind the dams, releasing it in mid-summer. 

That might sound pretty reasonable, except for a few niggling details – like that fact that the dams would likely cost Washington taxpayers billions of dollars, while flooding thousands of acres of farmland and wildlife habitat. 

The Lands Council, a Spokane based non-profit, thinks that it has a better idea:  enhance beaver populations, and let the furry wonders do the dam construction for free!