Daily Score Blog

Stormwater -- the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants -- poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars.

The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the pollutants that are picked up by the torrents of rain along the way, including copper, oil and grease, and pesticides.

Stormwater presents a daunting challenge considering the Northwest's rapid pace of development, and the fact that residential areas have three-times the rate of runoff compared to forests and fields (see page 12). Polluted stormwater kills salmon returning to urban streams to spawn before they can lay their eggs. It forces the closure of acres of shellfish beds made unsafe for human consumption. The rush of water causes erosion and fills basements with muddy water.

The good news is we already know some of the best, cheapest solutions for controlling runoff. The bad news is the solutions aren't being widely used. 

In a step forward for bioregional thinking, Washington has agreed to add a new name to the Northwest's official geographic lexicon: the Salish Sea. Following on the heels of British Columbia's endorsement, the term will now be used to refer to the collective inland waters of Puget Sound, Georgia Straight, and the Straight of Juan de Fuca.

It doesn't replace any of those names, but "Salish Sea" does provide an important addition to our understanding of Cascadia. Because the new term is firmly rooted in both history and ecology, it may help direct more attention to protecting the natural heritage of the region.

At Crosscut, Knute Berger has done a bang-up job covering the Salish Sea name-change. See here, here, here, and here.

If you didn’t know what blackmail is, David Letterman has probably made you familiar with it by now. Blackmail can be criminal or it can be something as simple as a kid a grocery store saying “if you don’t buy me cookies I’ll scream.”  But what about when business or industry uses the threat of lost jobs to persuade legislators to support or oppose legislation? We’ve heard this kind of thing before; “if this legislation passes, thousands of jobs will be lost.”

In doing some ongoing research on green collar jobs (check our primer) I discovered a new book, Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities by Brian Mayer. The intro of the book is online and worth a read. In it he takes on the topic of “job blackmail.” The term caught my eye. Mayer, citing an earlier study of the beneficial economic impacts of environmental legislation, defines job blackmail as:

All of the kids returning to school this week brings to mind those classic school essays along the lines of "What I did this summer" and "What does democracy mean to me?" Should the kiddies be confronted with a new twist on the latter -- "What will climate change mean to me?" -- they'll find help from a new tool released recently by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi.

Climate Wizard provides predicted temperatures and rainfall worldwide for 2050 and 2100 based on best-, medium-, and worst-case scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions and global warming (the non-US data is only available for 2050 at present). You can zoom in for a closer look on regions and states you're most interested in. 

Cities in Cascadia should be feeling pretty good right now. This month the Natural Resources Defense Council released its ranking of Smarter Cities in the US and our area scored well.

For large cities, this region dominated the top three spots with Seattle at No. 1, San Francisco at No. 2, and Portland at No. 3. Cascadia also did well for medium cities, and for small cities Washington's Bellingham landed the top spot and Mountain View, Calif., located outside of SF was just behind it (see highlights of how NW American cities placed below).

This was much more than a feel-good popularity contest. The folks at NRDC attempted a really thoughtful, detailed analysis for the rankings, sifting through more than 600 cities to find those that are leading the nation in their sustainable ways.

Green building shouldn’t be a luxury exclusively for high end condo buildings or big showpiece public projects. On the contrary green building is an important way of making housing affordable.

The Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) is taking this idea seriously, in part because of funding now available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Stimulus funding—$250 million over 3 years—has been set aside for retrofitting low-income multi-unit housing, in particular, housing for seniors, disabled people and people who qualify for vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

 To help think through the application process and their overall vision for greening their buildings (specifically Sellwood and Gallagher) and operations, Portland held an Eco-Visioning Charette in June. The purpose of the charette was to explore the best thinking on how to bring together their housing development and operations to maximize energy efficiency and reduce impact on climate and the environment.

Puget Sound is in the big leagues with the EPA approving the state's "Action Agenda" for recovering Washington's inland sea. The approval "signifies the agency’s full commitment to helping carry out the Agenda to protect and restore Puget Sound," stated an agency press release from Wednesday.

With the EPA's blessing, the effort could get up to $20 million this year in federal funding for work to restore the Sound to health.

The 204-page Action Agenda, which was released in December by the state's Puget Sound Partnership and Gov. Chris Gregoire, is a "blueprint for recovery." It includes:

• Fixing and improving sewage and septic systems
• Increasing the use of development techniques that capture rainwater on site so that it doesn't flow as polluted runoff into the Sound
• Shoreline restoration work
  

This isn't the only pot of money coming to the Sound. The Northwest Straits Commission, a nonprofit working on Puget Sound projects, is getting $4.6 million of federal stimulus money to remove lost fishing nets that drown thousands of birds, fish, and marine mammals each year.

The money was awarded in June by the NOAA Fisheries Service to the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Foundation. The commission's director, Ginny Broadhurst, said the 18 months of support could result in the removal of 90 percent of the abandoned nets in the Sound.

Steeple photo courtesy of Flickr user joiseyshowaa under the Creative Commons license.

One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls' Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area's economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.

I don't know what Kool-Aid the region's newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts -- the timber wars and salmon recovery -- and found pretty constructive solutions.

That's not to suggest there hasn't been plenty of real fight to write about. And I'm no fan of self-serving "good news" stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it's also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.

The Oregonian story isn't exactly a good news story anyway. It's about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there's a little positive spin about the "Sustainable Klamath" brand. But the story manages to offer a real - and surprising - portrait of a community that's thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn't repeat itself.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

The 2009 Washington State legislature came to a close last month and talk of a special session has dissipated. So how did the environment – and opportunities for efficiency, transportation and smart energy choices -- fare during this latest gathering of law makers?

Overall the 2009 session was a mix of defeats for larger more comprehensive measures but wins for smaller, more focused legislation. 

Let’s start with Priorities for a Healthy Washington, a legislative agenda put together by The Environmental Priorities Coalition. The Coalition had 4 items on its list this year.

I just took a trip to Portland and was reminded of the split incentive problem in rental housing.  Hotels face a split incentive too: once a guest has paid for the room, he has no incentive to conserve resources because the hotel foots the energy costs.

Now consider the way that hotels are dealing with the split incentives on energy use: they are appealing to our consciences. I have done a lot of traveling over the last few years, but I can’t remember a hotel that hasn’t included a card in the bathroom encouraging me to use the same towel over again if I am staying more than one night.

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.

Oregon's attempt to establish a network of marine reserves -- an excellent idea -- appears to have sorta belly-flopped. Instead of the 20 marine protected areas proposed by conservationists, the state's Ocean Policy Advisory Council is recommending just two.

Unfortunately, two does not a network make. That's a shame because it's a network of reserves that yields the most meaningfuly environmental and economic benefits. Networks of reserves, where fishing is prohibited, allow fish stocks to thrive. That's obviously a benefit for the ocean ecosystem, but it's also a benefit for the fishing industry. The evidence on this matter is, in fact, pretty solid: setting aside no-fishing areas can actually increase fishing yields. When fish populations have core places to sustain them, they end up being more plentiful both inside and outside the protected areas.

It's good stuff, or it ought to be. But good ideas can run afoul of bad politics. As the Oregonian editorial board put it:

Marine biologists have convinced environmentalists, politicians, government regulators and newspaper editorial boards. In Oregon, though, scientists have failed to convince the commercial fishing industry and vocal parts of the communities supported by it.

...Oregon communities along the coast, already leery of marine reserves after an earlier such attempt when John Kitzhaber was governor, became inflamed with opposition to Kulongoski's idea during months of public discussion of it.

It really may be that is was mainly a batch of especially vocal and influential folks who weren't convinced.