This post was co-written by Kathleen Ridihalgh, Senior Representative for the Sierra Club’s Northwest Region

The first three days of this week are seeing a slew of activities taking on coal. We have events in 25 states to counter the coal industry and cheer on clean energy investments. It’s all part of our National Day of Action, and there are events happening across the nation, including rallies, public hearings, coal deliveries to polluters, press conferences, brown bag lunches, coal tours, and town hall meetings. Our Campuses Beyond Coal campaign is holding photo petition events on a dozen campuses nationwide, calling on campus administrators to shut down old, dirty coal plants polluting those universities and the neighboring towns.

These events are all sending one message from coast to coast -- coal is dirty business, and we need clean energy. You should check the website to learn more about these creative events and see if there are any taking place near you.

As we watch activists in these states work together for clean energy, we want to highlight a few states taking steps in the right direction that we hope other states will emulate. The Governors of Washington (Chris Gregoire), Oregon (Ted Kulongoski) and Montana (Brian Schweitzer) have all committed their states to meeting climate goals and investing in a clean energy future.

Now these three governors can continue to lead the way and take another tangible action within the region that will make significant progress towards meeting those goals: Directing the Northwest Power and Planning Conservation Council’s (NWPCC -- the region's official power planning agency) latest power plan to phase out coal by 2020, assign a responsible cost to carbon pollution, and maintain high energy efficiency goals.

This may be the one action they can take that is solely under their power to deliver. And they can do it today. This would get the region on a path to reducing the emissions from our electricity by 77 percent and ensure a safer, cleaner, more reliable energy portfolio overall. NWPCC has even stated that "serious efforts to reduce or even stabilize CO2 production beyond 2005 will likely require replacing existing coal-fired power plants with low CO2-emitting resources."

Washington's Gregoire and Oregon's Kulongoski have made real progress and paved the way for meeting the climate challenge. The 6th Power Plan is an excellent opportunity for Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer to demonstrate a true commitment to meeting the scientific goals for climate change.

This step with the NWPCC would mesh well with the states’ actions thus far:

But this action with the NWPCC is something they can do in the Northwest to show the rest of the world that there is a better way. We urge the governors to stay true to their vision now with the NWPCC Power Plan -- they should improve the current plan by maintaining maximum energy efficiency goals, putting a price on carbon emissions, and stating, as a goal, the plan to move the region off coal power by 2020.

This would be the single most important step they can take to have any real chance of meeting their states goals and making real their personal commitment to this important issue.

If you’re in the Seattle area, you can help promote this idea of moving the region off coal at a rally on Wednesday night. Otherwise, be sure to find any National Day of Action events near you.

The NWPCC is also having hearings throughout the Northwest where you can make your voice heard for a Coal-Free Northwest:

Though it has spent millions on "clean" coal advertising, the truth is that the coal industry has for years actively fought against cleaning up the existing fleet of over 500 coal-fired power plants, some of them dating back to the Eisenhower Administration. The industry must stop trying to block common sense regulations and policies that will protect communities and the environment. Rather than seeing these efforts as a threat to jobs and the economy, such regulations are the path forward to protect people’s livelihoods. Strong regulations put us on a path to cleaner technology that boosts economic growth, creates jobs and protects the planet. 

We didn't use to have a choice about how to power America. Today we can do better.  It's time to clean up pollution from coal and build the clean energy economy.

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The new U.S. climate change impacts report -- on which we've been reporting all day -- includes some hard-hitting regional data.

For example, did you know that annual average temperatures in the Northwest rose about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century -- with some areas seeing increases up to 4 degrees? And the rising mercury ain't slowing any time soon: average temps are predicted to rise another 3-10 degrees in this century.

That may not sound too bad to those of us craving some summer warmth. But it's scary news if you're a local salmon craving cold water -- or a ski bum craving cold snow, for that matter.

How else will rising CO2 emissions (and rising temperatures) affect our region? Here are some highlights (low lights?) from the report:

Highly populated coastal areas throughout Puget Sound, Wash., are vulnerable to sea-level rise. The maps show regions of Olympia and Harbor Island (both located in Puget Sound) that are likely to be lost to sea-level rise by the end of this century based on moderate and high estimates.

P.S. I'm focusing my anxiety on the Northwest regional data because, well, that's where I live. But the news is bad all over ... check it out for yourself.

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Puget Sound orcas gain more protection; Florida manatees downlisted to threatened

Ninety endangered orcas in the Northwest may soon swim easier, as the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed Friday to designate nearly the entire Puget Sound -- about 2,500 square miles of water -- critical orca habitat. The usual suspects took the usual sides: developers opposed more regulation; enviros said the proposal didn't go far enough, since it excludes waters less than 20 feet deep, which is prime habitat for orca prey. The proposal will be open to public comment but could be final as soon as November. On the opposite side of the nation, Florida's wildlife commission voted last week to downlist the manatee from the state's endangered species list to threatened status, despite continued dangers from red tide, boats, and habitat loss; greens contend that the commission is being pressured by development and boating interests. The manatee is listed as endangered by the feds, but that status is also being reevaluated. Oh well, you know what they say: You orca some, you manatee some.

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Bush Team Aims to Revoke Protections from Threatened Seabird

The Bush administration took a big step yesterday toward removing the marbled murrelet, a Northwest seabird, from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a move enviros say will lead to further logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. The ruling from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service states that the declining murrelet population in Oregon, Washington, and California is not sufficiently genetically distinct from the more healthy murrelet populations in Canada and Alaska to warrant special protection. Problem is, the ruling flies in the face of the recommendation of the agency's own Northwest office. That office's report was changed on orders from Assistant Interior Secretary Craig Manson, the Bush administration's point person on the ESA. Said Interior spokesflack Hugh Vickery, "It's not changing science. It's more interpreting and applying the law."

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Bush Administration Won't Remove Northwest Dams to Save Salmon

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it will not remove dams from the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest as part of its efforts to save endangered salmon runs. According to Bob Lohn of the National Marine Fisheries Service, "Our work shows that you can achieve recovery without removing the dams." The agency said that improvements in ocean conditions, combined with the installation of removable spillway weirs that can guide young fish through the dams, will push forward the recovery of endangered salmon, which NMFS claims is already underway. The policy marks a sharp break from four years ago, when federal agencies acknowledged that breaching the dams would be the most scientifically certain way to save the fish. John Kober of the National Wildlife Federation, which is leading a lawsuit over river operations in federal court, said that the agencies' reversal was a gift to President Bush's reelection campaign (Bush has promised not to breach the dams) that contradicts "decades of experience and volumes of their own scientific data."

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New Scorecard Measures Sustainability Progress in Northwest

Nightly newscasts report on the stock market and the GDP. But do these common measures really tell us how society is faring? Northwest Environment Watch, a Seattle-based think tank, doesn't think so. Today it released its first annual Cascadia Scorecard, intended as a better assessment of the overall well-being of the Pacific Northwest (Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). On four of six measures, the region is improving: protecting and managing forests, containing sprawl, lowering birth rates, and improving life expectancy. On the other two -- economic security and energy efficiency -- little progress is being made. "There's an old adage in business that what gets measured gets fixed," said NEW's Clark Williams-Derry. The report is intended to help the region build "a way of life that can last, where the human economy is reconciled with the natural systems that support it -- where people are doing fine and nature is, too," he said.

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Bush Announces Environmental Money for Swing States

A recent flurry of announcements from the Bush administration about proposed funding increases for environmental projects -- including salmon restoration and brush clearing in the Northwest, Everglades protection in Florida, and cleanup of the Great Lakes -- has some enviros suspicious. Not that they aren't glad to have a bit more money going to good causes. But they point out that the funding increases have several things in common: they are for programs the administration pushed to cut as recently as last year; they represent a fraction of the money requested by the affected parties; they were announced with fanfare in an election year; and, most significantly, they funnel money to crucial electoral battleground states. "God help you if you're waiting for EPA to clean up a toxic waste site outside of a swing state," said Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust. The White House rejected the contention that its announcements were politically motivated.

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Bush Officials Stand Atop Dam to Trumpet Salmon Funding

Bush administration officials announced a $10 million increase in funding for restoration of endangered Northwest salmon on Monday, drawing election-year attention to recent increases in salmon numbers. Enviros expressed measured support for the rise in funding, but pointed out that higher salmon numbers were mostly attributable to changing ocean conditions. They also pointed out that $10 million is a fraction of the $110 million funding increase the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission says is needed to pay for ongoing restoration projects. They also pointed out that a federal blueprint for Columbia Basin salmon recovery was rejected by a U.S. district judge last year as insufficient to meet the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. They also pointed out that the announcement was made from atop the Bonneville Dam, which kills lots of salmon. They also pointed out ... well, you get the idea.

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Judge Bans Pesticide Use Near Northwest Salmon Runs

A federal judge Thursday banned the use of a wide range of pesticides in and around thousands of miles of waterways in the Northwest frequented by endangered salmon, and required stores selling seven of the most dangerous banned pesticides to display signs reading "salmon hazard." U.S. District Judge John Coughenour's sweeping ruling, which will apply to everything from farms to orchards to golf courses, establishes a 100-yard buffer around streams when aerial spraying and a 20-yard buffer when ground spraying -- protective measures that the ruling calls "common, simple, and effective." Although the ruling was expected, it drew alarmed reactions from farming groups, which warn that it could hurt the economy and drive small farmers out of business. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by enviro and fishing groups against the U.S. EPA, which sought immediate protections for salmon under the Endangered Species Act, and is expected to have broad consequences for similar suits pending around the country.

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Enviros Say Pesticide Makers Are Illegally Influencing EPA

Northwest salmon and other endangered species could suffer because pesticide manufacturers are acting illegally to weaken rules on the use of dangerous chemicals, enviros are charging. A coalition of environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club, last week warned the U.S. EPA that they would file suit if the agency didn't act within 30 days to change the operations of an industry task force that they say has been pushing for looser rules on pesticide use near endangered species. The task force was created to provide the EPA with data on the use of pesticides near endangered species; enviros say it has overstepped its bounds and illegally assumed an advisory role, while the EPA and industry representatives deny the charges.

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White House Political Maneuvering Could Hurt Northwest Salmon

President Bush lost in Oregon and Washington in the 2000 election, but his team is working to ensure that he fares better in the Pacific Northwest in 2004 -- and that may mean trouble for salmon. Bush's top strategy honcho, Karl Rove, has been making quiet trips to the region and, some say, pressuring federal agencies to loosen protections for salmon and other endangered species because agricultural interests in the Northwest don't want protective measures to interfere with irrigation. Rove's intent seems to be to shore up support from Bush's base: farmers, ranchers, and the timber industry. The Interior Department's inspector general is launching an investigation into whether the White House interfered in the development of water policy in the Northwest. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a presidential contender, also sees something fishy going on here; he charged the Bush administration with acting "as if federal agencies like the Interior Department are a division of the Republican National Committee and at their disposal to give out political favors."

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President Bush made a swing through Oregon and Washington state late last week to talk up his environmental agenda in an attempt to attract eco-concerned suburban voters, but he was met with thousands of protesters who didn't buy his promises to deliver "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests." More than 2,000 demonstrators greeted Bush in Portland, Ore., on Thursday, before he was flown over a forest fire and then touted his fire-prevention strategy, which relies on increased logging in national forests. On Friday, Bush stood in front of the Ice Harbor Dam in eastern Washington and claimed that salmon can be saved without breaching any power-generating dams. But he chose a poor example for a backdrop: The Ice Harbor Dam has violated water-quality standards for 39 days in a row, making the water behind it hot enough to kill salmon.

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In 1975, Ernest Callenbach published a slim book called Ecotopia, in which the Northwest secedes from the United States and establishes itself as an ecological paradise. The text became a counterculture classic, and the term "Ecotopia" entered the lexicon, embodying the American tendency to think of the continent's forested far coast as a land of recycling bins and spotted owls, old-growth purity and environmental correctness.

New Ecotopia?

But Callenbach was wrong, hindsight shows. On the most important criterion, New York City has a better claim to the title of Ecotopia than does the soggy region stretching north from San Francisco to the Canadian border.

Yes, the Northwest has cleaner air and water than the Big Apple, and an impressive share of its ecosystems still exist in something approximating their original state, which cannot be said of New York. Yes, Northwesterners generate 40 percent less trash than New Yorkers and recycle more of it -- a gap that will widen now that Gotham has gutted its recycling program. (Callenbach was right about "the rigid practices of recycling and reuse upon which Ecotopians are said to pride themselves so fiercely.") And Northwesterners are more frugal with water: The residents of greater Portland, Ore., consume a fifth less -- and Seattleites a quarter less -- water per person, despite the large, un-New Yorkish lawns they irrigate.

And there's little contest when it comes to attitudes and activism. The Northwest has an attachment to nature and to outdoor pursuits perhaps unrivaled on the continent, and the region has been the proving ground for one environmental reform after another: Oregon's 1971 bottle bill and 1972 land-use planning; Seattle's pioneering efforts in energy conservation in 1975 and comprehensive curbside recycling program in 1988; the region's protection of old-growth forests in the early 1990s; and, since the late 1990s, a full-fledged salmon recovery effort that blankets entire metropolitan areas.

But look at Northwesterners' consumption of energy, the most significant environmental metric, and one that's coupled to everything from dam-blocked salmon runs to collapsing Antarctic ice shelves, from the Exxon Valdez to Three Mile Island. Callenbach's book describes a place that has pared its energy use to a minimum. But today the Northwest -- including Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia -- uses one-third more energy per resident than does the state of New York. New York City residents use even less.

A typical commute in Seattle.

Photo: Washington State Department of Transportation.

The main difference in energy use relates to transportation. In Callenbach's Ecotopia, there isn't a gas station in sight. In the real, energy-dystopic Northwest, a typical resident burns more than three times as much gasoline per day as a typical New Yorker. The gas, of course, fuels motor vehicles, the principal polluters of local air and the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. These climate-altering pollutants, in turn, are arguably the biggest environmental threat of the new century; stanching their release tops the planetary to-do list.

The five boroughs of New York City have one car or truck for every four residents; the Northwest has more than three times as many. In fact, the Northwest has more vehicles than licensed drivers. So much for "the Ecotopians' abolition of cars." Worse, Northwesterners are trading their cars for trucks, which burn more fuel, spew more heat-trapping emissions, and pose greater collision risks to other drivers and pedestrians. Oregon's trucks, including minivans and SUVs, are likely to soon outnumber cars; in Idaho, they already do. But in New York state, just a quarter of all vehicles are trucks.

A train runs in Brooklyn.

The difference in driving rates is easy to explain: metropolitan New York is compact and well served by public transit; the Northwest sprawls. Studies of 68 cities on four continents show that as the population density of a neighborhoods rises, driving drops off, transit use surges, and walking and cycling flourish. More than any other factor, density is the key to reducing our dependence on motor vehicles. And New York is the New World's density capital, which makes it the winningest city not only for baseball but also for transit and walking. Portland, the darling of the urban planning guild, and my hometown of Seattle both pale by comparison, as does even Vancouver, B.C., which is probably the densest city west of the Mississippi.

It's true that New York City comes by its transit-friendly nature for reasons unrelated to, and perhaps antithetical to, environmental consciousness. The architects of the city's density were unscrupulous real estate developers who held sway over city hall -- an ecological triumph by accident. But the Northwest has also benefited from its share of historical and geographical flukes. Settled late by Old World migrants, the Northwest has fewer aging dumps, antiquated factories, and dirty boilers than New York. Its forests were plundered less thoroughly than those on the East Coast. And its air supply is buffered from Asian factories by the Pacific Ocean, while New Yorkers breathe the exhaust of power plants in the Midwest.

Pedaling toward a greener future in Portland.

So how can the Northwest become more like New York without becoming New York? Reducing our addiction to automobiles is paramount, and the most effective way to do this is to curb sprawl and make our cities more compact and friendlier to walkers, cyclists, and mass transit. We've already made progress in this area -- witness the dramatic downtown growth and effective farmland protection policies of Vancouver, B.C. -- but we need to implement other innovations, such as zoning and tax measures that do a better job of encouraging mixed-use neighborhoods and modest increases of density, and that better enforce our urban growth boundaries.

Policies aimed at making it easier for residents to drive less could also help. Oregon recently passed a bill encouraging insurers to offer pay-as-you-drive car insurance, which would reward consumers for trimming their mileage. Seattle's Puget Sound Regional Council is test-driving congestion pricing, an innovative program that would make the price of driving reflect its true cost to society and the environment. Vancouver, B.C., which decided not to build a freeway through its downtown, offers many lessons in restraining the use of cars in the city.

Such efforts may help the region finally live up to its reputation as an ecological paradise. Until then, though, we Northwesterners with our cars and carbon dioxide will have to look east to find Callenbach's imagined country. Ecotopia is on the Hudson.

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The Bush administration has been discreetly gutting environmental protections by encouraging industry groups to sue over rules and then settling those lawsuits on terms favorable to industry, enviros argue. Using such tactics, the administration has allowed more logging in Northwest forests, curtailed protections for roadless lands and potential wilderness areas in the West, and reopened national parklands to snowmobiles. "In the guise of settling lawsuits, federal officials have retired to the backroom to work out deals that sacrifice our old-growth forests, salmon, and clean water for the sake of clear-cutting our public lands," said Patti Goldman of Earthjustice, a public-interest law firm. Meanwhile, the feds have also let polluters off the hook for as much as $30 million over the last two years by neglecting to raise fines and penalties to keep pace with inflation, as required by law.

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The Bush administration is proposing changes to its salmon-protection strategy that critics say would endanger salmon while boosting logging in the Pacific Northwest. As it now stands, federal rules prohibit timber sales and other activities on public lands unless officials can demonstrate that fish would not be harmed. Under revisions proposed this week, officials would merely have to show that proposed projects would not have long-term negative impacts on an overall watershed. The administration's aim is to boost logging in the Northwest to 1.1 billion board feet of timber per year, the level set as a goal under former President Clinton's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan but never attained. Enviros say the administration's proposed changes would significantly boost landslides and other environmental degradation. "I think this would be a massive erosion of the single most important landscape protections for salmon and steelhead on [Northwest] public lands," said Chris Wood of Trout Unlimited. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management will accept public comments on the proposal through July 10.

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The Bush administration received an "F" from the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition for failing to make progress on protecting endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The coalition, which is comprised of regional environmental and conservation organizations, said the administration has not implemented three-quarters of the measures mandated under a salmon-recovery plan adopted in 2000. Since taking office, the administration has provided only half the estimated $900 million per year needed to fund the plan. Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who advises Save Our Wild Salmon, accused the administration of intentionally ignoring the plan, and warned that the feds could wind up in court if they did not begin to take salmon recovery seriously.

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Federal protections for the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet have been blamed by many in the anti-enviro camp for the collapse of the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s. Now, the Bush administration has announced that it will review those protections, as well as the designation of "critical habitat" thought necessary to ensure the survival of the species. The agreement to review the protections settles a lawsuit brought by the timber industry against federal biologists for allegedly dragging their feet on reviewing the health of the two birds. Under the terms of the settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must review the status of both species by the end of this year, and review the designation of critical habitat for the owl and murrelet by December 2005 and August 2006, respectively. Both species are currently listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act, but a strong bill of health could alter their classifications and change the level of protection they receive.

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The U.S. Navy regularly tests one of its weapons by firing radioactive ammunition into prime fishing waters off the coast of Washington state, a practice that fishers, scientists, and activists say could be harmful to human and environmental health. The weapon, known as the Phalanx or the Close In Weapons System, fires up to 4,500 rounds per minute of depleted uranium (DU), a highly dense metal that remains radioactive for around 4.5 billion years. The Navy insists that DU poses no threat to its crew members or to Washington's coastal environment. No major studies have been done on the effects of the DU-containing weapons on the ocean environment, but the use of DU in land combat has led to radiation releases and the production of toxic dust that can enter the food chain. A coalition of Northwest environmental groups and anti-war activists is considering seeking an injunction to halt the weapons tests.

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Following the collapse of the Northwest timber industry in the 1990s, thousands of workers lost their jobs. The conventional wisdom has been that these workers were absorbed by a boom in the region's high-tech industry -- but a new study of a decade's worth of employment records questions that conclusion. True, the region's economy as a whole grew during the '90s, but former timber industry workers didn't benefit. More than half of the 60,000 people in Oregon working in the industry at the beginning of the 1990s left their jobs by 1998. Of those, only 18,000 found other jobs in Oregon -- and half of the jobs they found paid lower wages than their previous positions. The environmental movement wasn't solely responsible for the shift; the increasing automation of sawmills and the depressed timber market contributed to the loss of jobs. Still, the study, coauthored by the economic consulting firm ECONorthwest and economists at Oregon State University and the Oregon Employment Department, may be the first significant attempt to understand how environmentally motivated economic changes affect workers.

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Some 92,000 acres of mud and sand at the bottom of the Pacific Northwest's Puget Sound is contaminated with dioxin, toxic metals, and PCBs (just for starters), all the result of industrial pollution. In turn, these nasties make their way into the sound's critters. Crabs are poisoned, while orca whales, salmon, and even some herring stocks are disappearing. The sound's beaches -- important nursery grounds for many fish -- are also in trouble because of rampant development. Scientists think global warming is also affecting the sound's sea life.

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