Environment Blog

Yesterday, the Seattle Times published a story about the impact rising temperatures are having on the Costa Rican coffee crop. This phrase stood out:

Global warming — more accurately called climate change — poses "a direct business threat to our company," Starbucks executive Jim Hanna told an Environmental Protection Agency panel in 2009 in Seattle.

One of the bills in Olympia receiving the most publicity this year is the push by the environmental community to shut down the Centralia coal plant, the only coal plant in the state, which supplies about ten percent of Washington's electric power. We believe that carbon creates risk and that putting a reasonable price on carbon makes sense -- and this would impact coal more than other forms of energy.

Advocates of this legislation, however, have made a number of unsupportable claims. Such claims indicate that a key part of this effort is about looking good rather than doing good.

When the Puget Sound Partnership was created, it was sold as a way to ensure the money we spend on water quality efforts in the Sound are scientifically grounded, coordinated among agencies and prioritized. This is an excellent approach, and the WPC has praised the creation of the PSP in our report card on the state's environmental policies.

This year, the environmental community is making protection of the environmental budget one of its top "priorities." The lobbyist for the Washington Environmental Council told the Associated Press, "Many of these programs are close to being decimated."

Unfortunately, they haven't always been so careful about setting priorities, supporting budget expenditures in the past that were more about politics than environmental benefit.

In the eighth part of our series, we look back at the eco-fad “Car-free days,” highlighting the lack of results and the high costs.