Current Stories
Editor's Top Picks
With goodies for everyone, climate bill passed
New York Times
06/30/2009
As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.
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Views: Many more baby bike steps in BC, please
BC Local News
06/30/2009
It’s always a precious sight to see a parent trying to show a little one how to ride a bike without training wheels. That’s about the same evolutionary stage TransLink is at with the opening of the Central Valley Greenway. It’s a baby step toward making Greater Vancouver conducive for commuting cyclists, or even recreational ones for that matter.
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Coastal restoration projects for habitat and jobs
Oregon Public Broadcasting
06/30/2009
In the Pacific Northwest, the federal agency that oversees ocean life will spend stimulus funding to reconnect tidal wetlands, remove obsolete dams and clean up marine debris by hiring dozens of out of work crab fishermen.
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BC training unemployed to fight forest fires
Toronto Globe and Mail
06/30/2009
The BC government is looking to train 750 unemployed people to help fight wildfires this summer. Officials said the province could use reinforcements on the fire lines, and laid-off forest workers and others who are unemployed would be perfect for the job.
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Canada to match US climate change rules
Toronto Globe and Mail
06/30/2009
Canada will adopt climate-change regulations comparable to those of the United States - including new rules for oil sands producers and refiners - to avoid punitive "green" tariffs, Environment Minister Jim Prentice says.
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Oregon grocers want joint bottle return center
Oregonian
06/30/2009
For years, Oregon's big grocers have wanted to offload the messy collection of bottles and cans returned under the state's storied bottle bill.
Now, the industry is taking its first crack at a new system: Under the proposal, four big grocery stores in Gresham would bar returns and bump them to a separate, industry-financed "redemption center" in a former auto dealership nearby.
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Produce travels to Seattle quiet as whisper
Peninsula Daily News
06/30/2009
Let us follow a strawberry, flush from the field as it travels on wind and water - but without petroleum - from Sequim to the big, hungry city.
People in Seattle want these oil-free Sequim berries with the Nash's Organic name on them, according to David Reid, owner and operator of Seattle's Sail Transport Co.
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Portland stores will sell Metro's recycled paint
Oregonian
06/29/2009
If that house color looks familiar, it may be for good reason. Portland's Miller Paint Co. recently announced an agreement with Metro to begin selling recycled latex house paint that has been collected at landfills.
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A green way to dump low-tech electronics
New York Times
06/30/2009
Since 2004, 18 states have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment - television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines - from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health.
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Climate bill shaped by compromise
Los Angeles Times
06/28/2009
President Obama's willingness to sit down with each group affected by a historic climate bill and compromise yielded a narrow victory in the House on Friday. The question is: did supporters give away so much in the process that the benefits to the environment ended up being slim to none?
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Hohmmmm: The zen of saving energy
KPLU
06/28/2009
Tracking energy use is the first step toward reducing your carbon footprint and saving money on your utility bill. Now, Microsoft is coming out with free software that let's you analyze how your home uses energy. It's called Hohm: a combination of "home" and "ohm," the unit for measuring electrical resistance.
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Going whole hog on energy upgrades
Sacramento Bee
06/28/2009
Jon Pyle is trying to do right by the environment and his pocketbook by having double-pane windows installed in his home, but some energy experts say the California resident doing it all wrong. Like most people, he's doing piecemeal energy efficiency upgrades rather than embarking on wholesale change.
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Stopping chain saws inside OR's urban areas
Oregonian
06/29/2009
Oregonians love the region's trees. Unless, of course, we need to cut them down, for any reason at all -- profit, development or even just to improve our view. Now two citizens groups are pushing urban tree codes designed to protect the area's leafy canopy as the population swells.
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Connecting Seattle rail to the beaten path
Seattle Times
06/29/2009
Seattle's new light rail trains won't quite take people to Columbia City's old brick storefronts built along an electric streetcar line. The challenge is to forge a transportation and psychological bond between the stop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South and the bustle on Rainier. Otherwise, ridership will sag.
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Boise's human-powered bike move
Boise Idaho Statesman
06/28/2009
The Boise Bicycle Project is resourceful: the sign on the front door was made with bike gears and rusted sections of chain. The non profit has rehabbed and donated 460 bikes to local kids, refugees and people in need. And Saturday hundreds of volunteers stepped up for its human-powered bike move.
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San Francisco aims for universal coverage
Sacramento Bee
06/29/2009
Three years ago, this city turned itself into a laboratory for remaking the country's health care system with a bold experiment to expand services to the uninsured, working poor and medically underserved. It's early to tell whether it should serve as a national model, with researchers beginning to evaluate the program's early successes and longer-term limitations.
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CA fingerprints all over climate policy
San Francisco Chronicle
06/28/2009
When California passed sweeping laws to fight global warming nearly three years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state politicians hoped the move would force a reluctant federal government to act. They got their wish.
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First foods inform tribe's conservation
Indian Country Today
06/28/2009
Resource management on the lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon took a unique turn a couple years ago when the board of trustees approved a plan built around consideration for their first foods: water, salmon, fish, big game, roots and berries.
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Clean energy funding roadblock ahead?
New York Times
06/29/2009
Since the economic crisis began last autumn, the once red-hot activity by wind and solar developers has slowed sharply. The U.S. government’s stimulus package is supposed to help support renewable energy, but what happens when the stimulus funding runs out, as it is scheduled to do for the industry’s projects in the next year or two?
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Cap-and-trade vote set in US House
Washington Post
06/23/2009
Democratic leaders in the House have scheduled a Friday vote on a climate change bill that would establish a cap-and-trade system to limit the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, a priority for President Obama. Proponents are still struggling to cement support for the legislation, with two new concessions to farm state lawmakers.
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Blowin' in the wind
ABC News
06/23/2009
Every time someone talks about the world's need to move on from coal and oil as its main energy sources, the next sentence seems to be that "there is no magic bullet," or one source to take the place of fossil fuels. But a new Harvard study found a network of land-based wind turbines could generate 40 percent more electricity than we use.
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Views: Why we need public health care
Wall Street Journal
06/23/2009
Why has health-care reform stalled in Congress? Democrats, after all, control both Houses, and President Obama, whose popularity remains high, has made universal health care his No. 1 priority. What's more, an overwhelming majority of the public wants it.
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Small BC cities creating vibrant downtowns
The Tyee
06/23/2009
Prince George's downtown development project began in 2008 when the city teamed up with Smart Growth on the Ground (SGOG), an offshoot program of Smart Growth BC that seeks to help BC communities prepare more sustainable neighborhood plans. It looks at land use, transportation, urban design, and building design plans in small to mid-sized BC communities and develops new concept plans that encourage smarter development socially, environmentally, and economically.
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National Park Service aims to reduce emissions
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
06/23/2009
The National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency have started the Climate Friendly Parks network program to help parks address climate change. Parks must measure their amounts of emissions, come up with plans to curb them and educate the public on what they can do to help.
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No country for old whiners
Oregonian
06/21/2009
Rather than complain about a 15-percent unemployment rate, Klamath County, OR, is applying its no-excuses ethic to economic sustainability. Geothermal energy already heats a spider-mite-growing greenhouse, a beer brewery and a college campus focused on medical technology training, adaptable agriculture and a greener timber industry.
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