Special Series
Economic Turnaround
In a Series
Wind Power Employs More Than Coal Mining
CNN reports on something I found fascinating:
The wind industry now employs more people than coal mining in the United States.
Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, coal mining employs about 81,000 workers... Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.
Is it time to start dialing down our pandering to the coal industry?
H/t to Alex Steffen
Our Poisoned Puget Sound
So I was really excited this week to tune into PBS to watch Frontline, a standout of investigative journalism, as it delved into what's ailing Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in a special called "Poisoned Waters." All right! Nationally acclaimed, heavy hitting reporting brought to bear on our own Sound.
I eagerly watched the two hour show and was surprised to learn … nothing. But upon a little reflection, I realized that my reaction made sense.
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Viaduct: What's That Sound?
Ah, the Viaduct -- the gift that keeps on giving. Yesterday’s Seattle Times quotes Washington's House Transportation Chair Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island) as saying, "if you listen carefully you will hear a giant sigh.” She believes it’s a sigh of relief, because the state legislature is moving forward with a plan to replace Seattle’s aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel.
But perhaps it’s a sigh of exasperation, exhaled by the 70 percent of Seattle voters who voted against replacing the Viaduct with a tunnel just 2 years ago.
The Green Building Race
I'm loving the spirited competition in green building that seems to be emerging among Northwest cities. Of course, Portland and Seattle have well-established programs, but Northwest cities big and small boast an impressive roster of energy-smart buildings. The latest (and possibly greatest) addition comes from Vancouver, which busted out with a new convention center that is surely one of the all-time grooviest buildings :
A sprawling, six acre green roof that'll be the largest ever, for a non-industrial application. Designed by LMN Architects out of Seattle (which itself has become a hotbed for cutting edge green architects), it posts some fairly remarkable stats: 400,000 individual indigenous plants, which will help regulate the building's temperature.
The Vancouver building also has black water treatment systems and desalination machinery to water the plants, a heat pump that uses seawater, and cooling via radiant floor. The bottom line is a water-use reduction of 60% to 70% over similarly sized convention centers.
Very cool. Let's add it to the list of flagship green buildings in the region. I wouldn't be surprised if it made the next ranking in the American Institute of Architecture's annual Top 10 Green Projects List.
But there's more to green building than creating awesome new places. There's also greening our existing stock of buildings. So I was thrilled to see Seattle roll out an excellent new program this week -- one that deserves more fanfare than it seems to have gotten in the press. (See here, here, and here, with the best coverage coming from the Seattle P-I.)
