Daily Score Blog

A couple of stories in this morning’s Oregonian highlight two ways Oregon is taking a common sense approach to sustainability and giving commuters lots of choices  besides cars.

The first item is about a topic I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, how to make bike commuting a viable alternative to sitting in traffic in single-occupancy cars. The City of Portland is celebrating National Bike Month by handing out bagels and coffee. 

May 15 marks the 20th anniversary of a state-federal agreement to clean up the Hanford site in south-central Washington. During the Cold War, Hanford produced most of the weapons-grade plutonium for the US nuclear arsenal -- and as a result, the site remains contaminated with an incredible volume of high-level nuclear waste.

To mark the upcoming anniversary of the Hanford cleanup agreement, the US Department of Energy has compiled a list of its accomplishments.

Yet there’s a tremendous amount of unfinished business at Hanford. The Washington Department of Ecology still calls Hanford “the most contaminated site in North America.”  And as this article, published recently in Remediation Journal, points out, the Hanford cleanup effort remains riddled with problems. (Full disclosure: John Abbotts, a longtime friend of Sightline, is one of the article’s authors, and also provided information for this blog post.) 

Some 50 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid wastes are still being stored at the site, contained (for now, at least) in more than 100 underground tanks that have already exceeded their design lifespans. A facility designed to stabilize and solidify the Hanford tank wastes is now 8 years behind schedule and about $8 billion over its initial budget. And the Department of Energy’s cleanup effort is underfunded: at the end of 2007, projected budgets over the next 10 years were expected to fall $5 billion short of the funding needed to meet the deadlines set by the state-federal cleanup agreement.

The most emailed story on The New York Times website today highlights The Story of Stuff, a video that the article describes as "a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste." With black-and-white drawings of smokestacks, big box stores and the Earth, the video explores the underbelly of our consumer culture in simple but stark terms. (Extraction, it opines, is just a fancy term for trashing the planet.)

Of course, Sightline wrote the book on Stuff, tracing what it takes to produce the staples of Northwest life, more than a decade before curbing your consumption was in vogue. But the viral video has found a new audience.
 

As a May 12 election day nears in British Columbia, the carbon-tax issue continues to cut across the electorate.

This weekend, former New Democratic premier Michael Harcourt co-signed an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail that endorses the provincial carbon tax, effectively breaking ranks with his party’s new leaders a few days before the vote. (The piece also calls for a bigger, bolder climate action plan.)

New polling results, also reported in the Globe, show contradictory attitudes toward carbon taxes. In short, Canadian voters are deeply conflicted about carbon tax shifting.

In theory, Canadian voters are open to considering taxing carbon; in practice, their support wavers. The more specific the proposal, the less voters like it: they like the BC carbon tax (which I’ve called one of the best designed carbon taxes currently in force anywhere in the world and others have similarly praised) least of all. The appeal of the BC policy appears to decrease with proximity to the province: it fares best in Atlantic Canada and worst in Northern Cascadia. Disappointing!

Curiously, though, within the province, disapproval of the Liberals for enacting the carbon tax shift is matched by disapproval of the New Democrats for attacking it. Weird, right? And at least one political observer—pollster Jeff Walker—believes those cross currents favor the Liberals. Walker told the Globe:

“Traditional soft environment voters in British Columbia who usually go into every election vowing to vote Green, but end up going with the NDP are now considering staying Green to punish the NDP.”

Which is essentially what I predicted would happen way back in October: “The New Democrats’ frontal assault on the carbon tax, while it may have gained them support in some circles (especially rural voters, I understand), has undoubtedly lost them support among environment-minded voters. Many greens will likely peal off to the Liberals or the Green Party. Splitting the left helps Gordon Campbell stay in office, and helps preserve the carbon tax shift as provincial policy.” Tomorrow and in the days beyond, we’ll see if this prediction holds up.