Puget Sound’s toxic runoff
Sen. Kevin Ranker and David Dicks are right that the millions of gallons of toxic runoff slipping into Puget Sound is a silent crisis. [“Puget Sound’s slow oil spill,” Opinion, May 20.]
Better controls on municipal drainage systems and increased funding for local governments are desperately needed, but that is only part of the solution. We also need to prevent chemicals from getting into the runoff in the first place.
Chemicals contaminating Puget Sound come from petroleum products and more than 80,000 chemicals currently on the market. Many of the chemicals are found in consumer products. Toxic flame retardants that have helped make orca whales one of the most contaminated marine mammals on the planet are not spewed from a factory pipe. They are coming from everyday products such as couches, chairs and electronic products. They are in our bodies too.
The same could be said for numerous other chemicals such as phthalates and “Teflon chemicals” now found in products, our bodies and Puget Sound.
The Washington congressional delegation has the opportunity to support The Safe Chemicals Act, a bill recently introduced in Congress aimed at changing this toxic status quo. They should support and strengthen the bill so that it ends the use of chemicals like toxic flame retardants. It is good for Puget Sound and good for our own health too.
— Ivy Sager-Rosenthal, campaign director of the Washington Toxics Coalition, Seattle
An uphill battle
It is clear that the Puget Sound Partnership has an uphill battle to restore and protect Puget Sound. Unfortunately politics —not science —seem to be influencing some of the Partnership’s decisions.
David Dicks, the Partnership’s executive director, attempts to capitalize on the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, claiming that “roughly 140,000 pounds of toxic chemicals” enter Puget Sound every day.
A closer look at the claim, however, reveals that while Dicks has relied on the same claim for the past two years, the Department of Ecology —the source of the claim —updated the pollution level after finding a significant error in its report. The new number is a drastic reduction, cutting the estimated range by two-thirds.
Despite the recalculation, no efforts have been made by the Partnership to revise the policies or priorities for which it advocates.
If the justification for the policies change, shouldn’t the policies themselves be reexamined? With a limited amount of resources, it makes sense to reevaluate priorities. Most important, the Partnership should leave hyperbole behind and set priorities based on the best science and most recent information available.
— Brandon Houskeeper, policy analyst at the Center for the Environment, Seattle
Kicking the coal habit, moving employees to more sustainable careers a common-sense proposal
Thank you for publishing Ted Nace’s “State should kick the coal habit” [Opinion, May 22]. It is outrageous that Washington taxpayers are subsidizing an industry that has such a negative impact on our region’s environment and earth’s climate. It is especially outrageous in light of the current budget problems.
Closing the plant in 2015 and redirecting the subsidy to help transition the TransAlta coal plant employees to more sustainable careers, as Nace suggests, is a common-sense proposal.
— James Williams, Seattle
Adding fuel to the fire
I am responding to “Local business owners planning for fallout from gulf disaster” [Business, May 21], which described a Seattle restaurant owner procuring his shrimp from Mexico rather than from the Gulf Coast.
While the oil leak disaster would produce serious shortages of Gulf Coast shrimp, why add fuel to an already raging ecological fire by substituting imported, farm-raised shrimp for U.S. shrimp? The level of U.S. demand is itself unsustainable and contributing to massive mangrove forest losses, fisheries declines and human-rights abuses just to feed our thoughtless appetite in the United States for cheap shrimp.
We need to see a reduction of our consumption rather than try to fill the “gap” left by the BP-created disaster.
— Alfredo Quarto, executive director of the Mangrove Action Project, Seattle
Shut down polluting coal-power plants
I was disappointed with what went unsaid in “As wind power booms, so do the challenges” [page one, May 23]. We have wind power in the first place because Washington state voters had the foresight to recognized that which other states are still denying.
The nation’s 2,000 most respected scientists — at The National Academy of Science — have just released the results of a study requested by the previous president, which finds that the nation is at the very edge of the cliff of being too late to save the planet from climate change, and that immediate and severe reductions in carbon dioxide pollution are necessary to start now in order to save the planet.
We need to reduce carbon dioxide pollution at a rate of almost 2 percent a year for about the next 50 years — until total carbon dioxide pollution emitted nationwide has been reduced by about 85 percent. Wind power is part of this solution. So is getting rid of TransAlta, one of the Pacific Northwest’s dirtiest emitters of pollution.
If we shut down old, inflexible and dirty coal-power plants, then we could replace them with new, clean, flexible and inexpensive natural-gas-power plants, located where the energy is needed to reduce loads on our aging power lines. Unlike coal, these new natural gas-power plants have the rapid response flexibility necessary to play well with wind power.
— James Adcock, Bellevue
Respect a legitimate lifestyle
In World War II, Boeing engineers knew how to use wind power correctly. The wind turbine people still do not understand these basics or they would not be building these monuments to ignorance.
Recently, Israel has amassed a $3 billion backlog for its ocean-motion power plant. This stands to reason as the world realizes it could now purchase a device that is at lease twice as efficient as wind turbines, more efficient than natural gas and it comes from people who have been seriously into alternate energy for more than 40 years.
We are no better than the people of India who buy a Boeing 737-800, then destroy it by saving a few dollars building their airports and training their people. Ignorance has its costs and doing these sort of things right is the only alternative for those that respect a legitimate lifestyle.
— Hugh Coleman, Kelso
All it takes for some people to be a little less trusting of their fellow humans is a little more testosterone, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
