Results tagged “pollution”

   

MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory is conducting experiments on garbage in Seattle through a program called "Trash Track." Utilizing "smart tag" technology, the team has created a device around the size of a matchbook with its own SIM card. The tag is placed inside a piece of garbage or recycling, then every 15 minutes pings the cell system to locate itself. This allows researchers at MIT to track the course of waste from the time its expelled by the user until it eventually winds up somewhere.

The other day—which is Seattlest-speak for "about two weeks ago"—the Port of Seattle offered the third in their series of Port 101 tours. This one sailed from Pier 66 down the Duwamish Waterway. The , of course, is that lower portion of the Duwamish River that has been straightened, channelized, and dredged into a human-made representation of its former self. But evidence of the past remains. If you take a close look at the street plat of the Georgetown area, you'll see swaths where, illogically it seems, there are no streets. This is where the river flowed.

It figures that on the same day the Dow sank below 10,000--its worst decline since...uh...last week--we'd also read that gas scooters and motorcycles are worse polluters than cars and SUVs. Thanks, Alan Durning! Sure, they're gas-sippers, but since you can't fit emissions equipment on the tiny little suckers, they're essentially like driving around a high-mpg leaf-blower. The EPA says driving some motorcycles 10 miles is as bad emissions-wise as driving a car 850 miles. We're going back to bed.

In Gourmet's excellent "Politics of the Plate" series, Barry Estabrook reports today on Alaska's Clean Water Initiative. It would have protected salmon by capping pollutants from the proposed Pebble Mine on Bristol Bay. But the measure went down to defeat in an election last month. Biggest winner: the mining industry. Biggest loser: the Bristol Bay salmon fleet. Biggest opponent of the Clean Water Initiative: the state's sitting governor, Sarah Palin, whose (ahem, pregnant and unmarried) daughter happens to be named Bristol.

Behind our couch lives what we refer to as our "third cat." Much more well-behaved and definitely lower-maintenance, petting-wise, than the two actual cats from whence it came, but more or less inert unless there's a breeze. When we sweep behind the couch every three or four years we generally don't carry the third cat down to the Sound and chuck him in, but that's what storm runoff is doing right now to a lot of people.

All mass transit is not created equal; here in Seattle, a city with buses and, well, nothing else, unless you're specifically talking with someone about monorail or lightrail or streetcars (you know, mass transit), when you're talking about supporting mass transit, you're talking about supporting buses.

, dropped a couple weeks ago, and we've been listening to it steadily since.

We don't mean to steal Mary's thunder; however, her photograph moved us to write down some of the thoughts we've been having about the Ballard Denny's closure. We knew it was coming; however, just like the presence of vampires in Sunnydale, we didn't actually want to think about it. The light, the clouds, the darkness of the trees, and the Shell sign way in the distance all punctuate the loneliness of the now-derelict sign.

Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took many hours to bring the little guys to the pinnacle of urban development, and then, since the game never ends, it took another many hours to tinker the place into slums and ruin, rezoning here, tearing out a transportation hub there, until finally you had to unleash natural disasters upon the land just to keep yourself interested.

Real estate search engine Rotten Neighbor promises to help you "find bad neighbors before you move." What evils have users uncovered behind the closed doors of the Emerald City?

brought it up.

This Saturday offers at least three ways to make a difference in Seattle, or at least look like you care whilst furthering your own selfish interests.

We're only weeks away from that magical time of year when we turn our local waters over to those diesel coughing, gray water vomiting, tourist dollar extracting devices the cruise ships. All hail! There have been a few changes at the Port this year and the new cleaner, greener personal have passed muster with the Bluewater Network, the cruise industry's traditional foil in local media, but Seattlest remains skeptical that increased cruise traffic in the Sound is in our best interest. See today's article on maritime pollution in the Post Intelligencer or this one on cruise ship wastewater. Let's throw our worries and a rock into a burlap money bag for the time being, though, and toss the whole thing overboard. Welcome to Seattle, cruise passengers! Hopefully you find something interesting on Seattlest for your 17 hours in the city! We're going to be talking a little bit about some of the cruise vessels that are coming to town and we're starting with the MS Zaandam.

God dammit! We're in no way convinced carbon offsets are any kind of a solution to global warming, but the news that a King County court has decided that Seattle City Light can't use ratepayer's money to buy them pisses us off nonetheless. Their argument is that it should be general taxpayer money that saves the Earth, and that ratepayer money is for the operation of the utility.

Last March we were trying to keep a stiff upper lip as we informed you that the bill banning PBDEs, a wily fire-retardant chemical, had been stifled for another year.

Governor Gregoire stood in front of the sculpture park yesterday and threw packets of hundred dollar bills into the Sound until $220 million disappeared into the sludge, or, she may as well have. Actually, she talked about the myriad environmental concerns that threaten Puget Sound and she pledged $220,000,000 towards the $9 billion the Puget Sound Partnership says it will take over the next 14 years to adequately protect and repair the Sound.

If the P-I is to be believed - and a good six out of ten times they are - we are in the midst of an illegal advertising blitz. The paper has an article today on a particularly grotesque form of urban pollution: unauthorized advertising appearing on the sides of buildings. In previous years the city would hear of maybe two a year, but so far in 2006 the city has received twelve complaints.

A few weeks back we suggested you might lay off the local salmon, you know keep your mercury levels in check and all that good stuff. However, in even more doomsday-ish news, some marine biologists are concerned that we might not have fish to avoid eating within the next 40 years.

If you've been on the waiting list for a Toyota Prius hybrid for as long as popular mythology would have us believe, you'll be pissed off to know where your car is. The state of Washington bought it out from under you and plastered livery stickers all over it. In 2006 the state's agencies bought 222 Priuses (Priuii?) and 206 Ford Escape hybrids, making this year the first in which the state has purchased more hybrids than standard-fuel automobiles.

Went to this NetGreen thing today at Bergen Park in Ballard. Took the bus, even. Dozen or so "electeds" on hand (city, county, federal) with their attendant staffers. Lots of bikes. An electric Xebra Zapcar. Lots of self-congratulatory speeches.

We saw an article in the Sunday New York Times about cities growing upwards that we knew someone in Seattle was going to pick up on. We thought maybe The Stranger guys might grab it and tear it up, but it looks like Knute is still looking for anti-density Mossblog fodder as he rides out his lame-duck term.

Q: What's up with gas prices? They shot up after Katrina, then they went back down again, but now it's ridiculous!

It's rained--hard--five out of the last six weekends. And after a week of beautiful weather, it's supposed to cloud over Saturday and rain Sunday. Along with the byplay of their weekend, the Seattlests answer the question "Why does God hate Seattle?"

Alice In Chains announced a tour schedule recently. No Layne, a duh, but the rest of the guys are doing a club tour of the states with venues like the Bowry Ballroom, the Metro and the Roxy scheduled. We don't care about New York, Chicago and L.A., you say, we want to know where they'll be playing in Seattle. Not on the list. After their appearance in NYC at the end of May they'll be going overseas to play more clubs and festivals through the end of August. No Seattle.

-It turns out that Elbert and Becky Higginbotham were more "hiding" than "lost" in the mountains in southern Oregon last week. Arizona has tagged them with meth related charges.

-If you missed the State of the Union, either intentionally or because you have a life, you should have a friend read it to you while you stare at this. Every once in a while jump up and start clapping or pull out fistfulls of hair and throw them to the ground.

There was a great editorial in the P-I over the weekend in which the writer Daniel Jack Chasan said (and this is Seattlest’s Paraphrase): The Sound is a mess. The Sound was a mess in the 80’s and we said we’d fix it and we never wanted to foot the bill so the Sound is mess now and we’re saying we’ll fix it and we won’t foot the bill. That was the gist of it, but it’s worth going to read for yourself if you haven’t.

Seattlest suddenly became a snowshoer yesterday. After pestering a snowshoe-aware friend of ours for about a year, the stars aligned, and we got the call that there was a small expedition heading out that night for Snoqualmie Pass. Arrangements were made (we put on our snow boots and a scarf), and at about 6:30pm we were on our way to do some night snowshoeing. It rained most of the way, but sure enough, as we approached the summit, white flakes were floating down and unaware drivers began gliding off the freeway in lazy pirouettes.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Apparently some residents of Seattle's South Park neighborhood feel that having a Superfund site in their backyard is enough, the rotten shirkers. They say it should disqualify them from helping cutting a few minutes off greater Seattle's freedom to jet about the country. Seattlest admits the discussion of Southwest's proposed move to Boeing Field hasn't exactly centered on environmental impacts so far. (But editorial boards tend to have their seats in lofty crags.)