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Not in YOUR Backyard: Cottages, In-law Apartments, and the Predatory Delay of HALA’s ADU Rules

When it comes to urban homes, it’s hard to imagine anything less threatening than granny flats. But surprisingly, in Seattle last year instill fear they did, provoking a handful of anti-housing activists to appeal proposed rule changes intended to spark construction of in-law apartments and backyard cottages. And in an exasperating turn of events, the appeal was upheld.

Of all the 65 recommendations in Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) plan, these homes—collectively known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in urban planner-speak—should have been one of the easiest wins. Tucked away on single-family lots, ADUs expand access to great neighborhoods for families who can’t afford a pricey, larger detached house. At the same time, they let more people live near jobs and services, shortening carbon pollution-spewing commutes and reining in sprawl.

Still, in many cities throughout Cascadia and the United States, the road to legalizing ADUs has been long. In Seattle’s case, that road hit a wall made of outdated thinking on urban development encoded in state laws that, ironically, were enacted to protect the environment. Because of the appeal, the city must now go back and conduct an exhaustive environmental review that is unlikely to substantially change the proposed ADU reforms. All it will do is squander time, postponing the fixes by about two years to mid-2018.

And every year of delay is a lost opportunity to create hundreds of new homes for people who do, or who want to, call this city home, all because a tiny minority of residents don’t want their neighbors to offer small rentals in their basements and backyards. It’s a phenomenon reminiscent of what writer Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay,” in which the fossil fuel industry has stalled action on climate change for its own benefit.

There are consolation prizes available to Seattle from this damaging setback, and I’ll get to them. But first, I’ll review the policies that can unlock ADU homebuilding, then tell the disheartening story of the appeal of Seattle’s proposed ADU rule changes, and finally, lay out the flaws in the obsolete regulations that led to all the trouble.

What’s holding back Seattle’s ADUs?

In a previous article I surveyed ADUs in Cascadia’s three biggest cities, finding that Vancouver trounces both Seattle and Portland in the ADU race. As of a year ago, a third of Vancouver’s single-family houses had a permitted in-law apartment or backyard cottage, compared to only about one percent of the houses in both Seattle and Portland. Vancouver reigns supreme mostly because officials simply ceased banning ADUs. They:  

  1.       stopped mandating an off-street parking spot for each ADU;
  2.       did not require the owner to live on-site;
  3.       allowed both an in-law apartment (constructed within the main house) and a separate backyard cottage on each lot; and
  4.       provided great latitude on size, height, and placement of ADUs.
In 2016, a year when developers opened nearly 6,000 new apartments in the city, Seattle added only 156 ADUs, up from 116 the year before.
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Consequently, Vancouverites have been adding roughly 1,000 ADUs per year to their single-family neighborhoods and now have some 27,000 total. Portland got it right on three of these four rules. The exception is that the Rose City still limits ADUs to one per lot. But still, it has seen the number of ADU homes ramp up considerably, as shown in the chart below. The city issued about 600 permits in 2016, and by this year’s end it will have an estimated 1,900 completed ADUs citywide, an increase of about 300 per year since 2015.

In contrast, Seattle’s current regulations fail on all four counts. As a result, despite high and rising rents (and soaring home equity that owners could borrow against to finance ADU construction), recent ADU production lags well behind both Vancouver and Portland. In 2016, a year when developers opened nearly 6,000 new apartments in the city, Seattle added only 156 ADUs, up from 116 the year before.

Chart created by accessorydwellingstrategies.com based on data collected by the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Note that not all permitted ADUs are built, and some ADUs are built without a permit.

The ADU-blocking appeal

In May 2016, ten months after HALA recommended the four rule changes above, Seattle leaders released an ADU plan to implement those recommendations, with a few caveats. The city asserted that the proposed changes did not require completion of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) under the Washington State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), because it would cause no appreciable harm to the environment—called a “determination of non-significance” (DNS).

A month later, the Community Council of Seattle’s affluent Queen Anne neighborhood appealed the DNS. The case went to city hearing examiner Sue Tanner, who in December sided with the Community Council. The city now must conduct a full-blown EIS, a process that typically takes at least a year and costs several hundred thousand dollars in city staff time and fees to consultants.

Tanner ruled that the city’s DNS was flawed for several reasons, some of which were procedural. Here, I’ll focus on the more pertinent and meatier allegations: that the DNS did not sufficiently analyze potential impacts on existing housing and displacement, parking, and public services.

The ADU opponents have it backwards on displacement

The ruling states: “The evidence here shows that the legislation would adversely affect housing and cause displacement of populations.” The evidence in question was provided by an economist who testified that allowing both an in-law apartment and a backyard cottage would attract “outside investors” enticed by the prospect of renting three units on a single lot, who would buy older cheaper houses, demolish them, and replace each with a new house and two ADUs. An urban planning consultant added that because investors would pick off the cheapest houses first, the proposed rule changes would cause displacement of lower-income “minority populations,” accelerating gentrification and diminishing the city’s diversity.

In response to previously voiced concerns about this “outside investor” scenario, Seattle’s proposal included a requirement that the owner live on-site for a period of one year after ADU construction was completed. City planners wrote that the rule would “ensure that speculative development interests are not able to develop single-family lots with ADUs and backyard cottages.” It turns out, though, as noted in the appeal, that there’s a workaround: an off-site owner could create a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) and grant a tenant a tiny fraction of ownership.

The hearing examiner’s conclusion that the proposed ADU changes would increase displacement hinges on an assumption that this LLC workaround would be prevalent. The ruling also relies on one witness’ opinion that the proposed liberalization would push the teardown economics across a tipping point, an opinion that cannot supported by on-the-ground data because there is none. No such sordid tales of ADU speculators run amok have yet to emerge from Vancouver, though home values are even higher there than in Seattle. Nevertheless, the appeal’s de-facto community leader Marty Kaplan hyperventilates that “there would be a feeding frenzy for anybody with a truck and a nail bag to go buy homes and convert them into three rental units and displace the population.”

In the majority of cases in-law apartments and backyard cottages are added to existing homes. But for the sake of argument, assuming that some amount of teardowns through speculative redevelopment would occur, even under those circumstances, is the ruling’s contention about displacement correct?

Short answer: no. That’s because the hearing examiner—like the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses—got it backwards: building more ADUs is not a cause of displacement; it’s a cure. As I detailed in a previous article, economic displacement (caused by rising rents) is displacing far more, probably at least ten times more, people in Seattle than is physical displacement (caused by demolition of existing low-cost housing). In the (likely rare) cases when an existing home is replaced by a new house with an ADU, the net effect citywide is less displacement, because creating more homes addresses the primary cause of rising rents: not enough homes for all the people who want to live in Seattle.

Sacrificing ADUs to stop teardowns won’t help

The teardown of a low-value house might cause the physical displacement of that house’s tenants. (It also might not: the previous residents may be the owners, or the teardown may be vacant because it is unfit for habitation. In any case, Seattle’s cheapest houses are already disappearing quickly to make way for exhorbitantly expensive new houses built to the maximum size allowed.) But preserving that existing house and forgoing a new ADU (or two) will only speed the increase of rents in cheap houses by exacerbating the housing shortage that is driving up prices across the board. Low-income families will pay more to get the same low-quality housing.

Not only that, when there’s a shortage of homes, the housing market is like a cruel version of the game of musical chairs. Those with money always win; those without always lose. Across the city, every ADU that does not materialize is like another a chair taken out of the game, and that translates to a low-income family displaced. Conversely, when one home is transformed into two, even in the worst case scenario where a family gets physically displaced from the original house, those two open “chairs” mean that two low-income families elsewhere in the city will not be forced out.

I am not trivializing displacement caused by a teardown. As Seattle grows, city policies and investments can support vulnerable communities so that they can stay in place and benefit from that growth. However, there is no escaping the fact that every home not added to Seattle’s housing stock leads to one fewer low-income family that can live in the city. The people who are indirectly displaced when construction of new homes is prevented are every bit as harmed as the people displaced by teardowns.

Worse yet, the hearing examiner’s ruling not only has it backwards on ADUs and teardowns but also advances a perilous line of thinking for affordable housing in general. If teardowns for the sake of ADU construction are a threat to affordability, the same is true for any other form of homebuilding. When there’s demand for housing, any change of laws that allows larger buildings will accelerate redevelopment. And the homes that get replaced first will be the cheap, worn-out, neglected ones—the ones with the lowest rents.

But that’s not all there is to the story, because except for the case of single-family houses, redevelopment invariably yields a larger number of homes, easing competition. More players in the game of musical chairs get a seat—that is, a home they can afford in the city. The pressure pushing up rents is relieved, from the top of the market all the way to the bottom. Thus, as tempting as it may be to impose restrictions in the hope of saving low-cost homes, doing so only makes things worse for affordability overall.

Backyard cottage designed by Nest Architecture & Design, located in West Seattle. Photo by Alex Hayden Photography, used with permission.

Stopping SEPA from doing more harm than good

Adopted in 1971, Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) comes from an era of horror stories about polluted cities that spawned a reflexive inclination to limit urban growth. It calls for an assessment of all the negative environmental consequences of major government decisions. Will more ADUs increase a city neighborhood’s car trips, crowded street parking, local air pollution emissions, energy consumption, or noise? What SEPA doesn’t require, though, is equal consideration of positive impacts.

Building more ADUs in Seattle’s neighborhoods will:

  • modestly reduce car trips across the metro area;
  • decrease car dependence and increase transit ridership, walking, and cycling;
  • slow sprawl and thereby protect forest and farmland from development on the metropolitan periphery;
  • improve integration by class (and therefore likely by race) in neighborhoods that currently exclude middle- and working-class people;
  • allow less affluent families to live near the city’s best parks, schools, and job opportunities;
  • trim consumption of fossil fuels; and
  • reduce pollution of water and air—and therefore climate change.
Compact, transit-rich, walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income cities are critical ingredients to a sustainable future.
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These benefits of compact communities—of density—are ubiquitous in the past three decades’ research on cities. Indeed, the main lesson of that entire body of work is that compact, transit-rich, walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income cities are critical ingredients to a sustainable future. Seattle officials shouldn’t have to prove this anymore than they have to prove that hydro- and wind-powered Seattle City Light electricity is better for the planet than the coal power that many rust belt cities rely on. So the fact that a handful of homeowners from an affluent neighborhood successfully used SEPA to stall ADU liberalization is, to understate the case, ironic.

If there is anything of redeeming value buried in the hearing examiner’s decision, it is the chance for the City of Seattle to complete an EIS that once and for all lays to rest the ruling’s spurious arguments and demonstrates how the net positive benefits of ADUs dwarf the negatives. Ideally, such an EIS could lay the foundation for city rule changes that would exempt infill housing construction from SEPA entirely.

The most important principle: New housing reduces displacement

First and foremost, the city can address the displacement issue directly to head off future attacks through SEPA against proposals to spur in-city homebuilding. Addressing it directly means establishing the fact that when there’s a shortage of housing across a city, adding new homes reduces net displacement, full stop. Even if the new homes are more expensive than the old ones. Because it all comes down to basic math: the bigger the gap between the number of homes and the number of people who want them, the more the competition for scarce housing floods down the market and pushes people with lower incomes out of the city.

When there’s a shortage of housing across a city, adding new homes reduces net displacement, full stop.
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It follows that every time a speculative developer replaces an existing house with a new one that includes an ADU (or two), it’s a net win for housing equity. Conversely, every time a teardown is replaced with the largest, most expensive house that will fit on the lot but that can only accommodate one family, it’s the worst possible outcome for equitable access to housing. If city officials fail to unequivocally demonstrate these fundamental truths, they will lose the argument from the start.

Removing the owner occupancy requirement is key

Seattle’s HALA recommended completely removing the owner occupancy requirement because such restrictions hamper ADU production. Also, in 2016 the city conducted two community meetings on potential ADU rule changes, and public feedback was nearly 2:1 against owner occupancy rules. As noted above, planners opted for a compromise that mandates one year of owner occupancy. (Incidentally, such rules may be illegal anyway.)

Requiring the owner to live on-site removes the 20 percent of Seattle’s single-family houses that are rentals from the pool of possible new ADU sites—sites where adding ADUs to existing rental houses would cause zero physical displacement. Plus, compared to typical homeowners, landlords are more likely to have the financial resources and expertise to invest in new ADUs. For many private homeowners, financing is the biggest obstacle to developing an ADU on their own. Risk-taking investors can play a key role in jump starting ADU construction by blazing the trail and establishing the design, construction, and finance infrastructure for ADUs in Seattle that will then make it easier for homeowners to get into the game. Barring non-resident investors from building ADUs will kneecap production, stifling the potential for ADUs to ameliorate Seattle’s housing shortage.

Some cities have rationalized owner occupancy requirements as a means to “preserve neighborhood character,” based on the perception that rental units may not be well maintained. But if this argument were valid, it would also justify applying the same rule not just to ADUs but to all rental homes, including everything from single-family houses to duplexes, rowhouses, and large apartment buildings. Singling out ADUs is discriminating against renters in the most sought-after residential neighborhoods. In a similar vein, some Seattle officials hope to assuage fears that speculative developers would build “backyard cottages that don’t fit the character of the neighborhood.” Such arguments prioritize some people’s aesthetic tastes over other people’s need for housing.

No one’s parking is more important than another person’s housing

Regarding parking, yes, removing the off-street requirement for ADUs might increase competition for street parking. A 2014 study in Portland found that on average, each ADU generates 0.46 cars parked on the street. But requiring off-street parking has numerous and hefty adverse impacts. Overall, off-street parking quotas make housing more expensive and deepen car dependence—in direct contradiction to two of Seattle’s most urgent aspirations for the future.

Besides, the City of Seattle has no obligation to provide convenient parking, free of charge, on publicly owned streets, to single-family homeowners—the vast majority of whom already have plenty of car-storage space on their own property. In an age of impending climate crisis, in a city where close  to half of greenhouse gas pollution comes from cars, it’s ludicrous that a policy change as benign as allowing more ADUs can be contested through the State Environmental Policy Act over parking.

Urban infill such as ADUs makes infrastructure more efficient

The SEPA appeal ruling also cited lack of analysis of public infrastructure, but most of these concerns are based on an outdated context. First of all, as an article I will publish soon details, in most of Seattle’s single-family areas, population density has decreased over the past few decades with the decline in average household size. In other words, in the not too distant past, existing infrastructure adequately served more people in most neighborhoods where ADUs would be built. The ruling calls out stormwater management in particular, but today’s stringent regulations ensure that any new construction will not increase polluted runoff, and in fact, will likely reduce it.

Furthermore, urban infill projects like ADUs typically cost less to serve with infrastructure compared with the alternative scenario of new homes forced out to more sprawling, suburban locations. Here again, the appeal ruling ignores modern reality—in this case, that urban infill housing lowers per-capita public expenditures on infrastructure.

Backyard cottage designed by live-work-play, located in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood. Photo by Cindy Apple, used with permission.

Let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot with SEPA

That adding homes to existing cities is a net positive for both people and the planet is an utterly uncontroversial principle of urban planning. One of the gentlest ways to do that is by allowing ADUs into areas otherwise reserved for single-family houses. Yet in Seattle, Washington State’s environmental laws enabled an obstructionist minority to torpedo a policy change that would have unlocked these much-needed, flexible housing options.  

The harm of delay is real: based on ADU construction rates in Vancouver and Portland, every year Seattle’s ADU rules remain unfixed and impede production, hundreds of families are losing the opportunity to rent in-law apartments or backyard cottages. Instead, they are competing for existing homes, and as the bidding wars cascade down the market, the lowest-income families are being displaced from Seattle. Rents are rising faster for everyone. Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods are remaining as exclusive as ever, off-limits to people of modest means. The delayed densification of the city’s most auto-dependent zones is hamstringing its progress beyond carbon.

Who is winning from the EIS delay? Almost no one, save for a few extreme NIMBYs who want to freeze their neighborhoods in amber, or who care more about street parking than welcoming new neighbors.

Who loses? All the city’s renters, who in the best case will pay a little more because of the added competition for apartments that the ADU delay is intensifying, and in the worst case may be forced to find somewhere to live in a cheaper location outside Seattle. But most of Seattle’s single-family homeowners lose, too: the majority of them support liberalizing ADU rules. ADUs not only fit Cascadians’ tolerant, welcoming values and laidback lifestyles, but they increase home values and income potential for homeowners.

Oh, and the planet. The planet loses, too.

For all these reasons, ADUs should have been the easy part of the HALA agenda. There is a potential silver lining, though. Seattle planners now have the opportunity to craft a definitive EIS that lays the groundwork for preventing the exploitation of SEPA by small numbers of entitled residents at the expense of everyone else. Priority one for the EIS is to establish the fundamental truth that regulatory changes allowing more homes are a net positive because more homes are a net positive. Optimistically, this path could lead to the exemption of all future infill housing construction from SEPA, expanding on what the city council recently approved for small and mid-sized apartment buildings in Seattle’s six official “urban centers.”

Event: Washington vs. World’s Largest Methanol Refinery

In the last several years, Cascadia has seen a tsunami of proposals to expand the region’s capacity to ship coal and oil throughout and out of the region. More recently, a third wave of proposals has emerged: fracked petrochemicals, including methanol, which Chinese companies would use to make plastics.

But methanol comes at a high cost. Sometimes pitched as green, there is no evidence to support the project’s hype of environmental responsibility. In fact, the plants that produce it require massive amounts of energy and water, even as they spew out wastewater and heavy metals and fill the air with toxic and climate-destabilizing pollution.

The proposed methanol refinery in Kalama, Washington, would be the world’s largest, opening the floodgates for fracked gas refining and export in Cascadia.

On Monday, April 24, Sightline policy director Eric de Place will speak in Seattle about fracked gas and the proposed Kalama methanol refinery. Dr. Mark Vossler, of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, and local Kalama activist John Flynn will also join in on the discussion.

Read Eric’s research here, and check out our three-minute infographic introduction to methanol in the Northwest and our Kalama methanol refinery infographic.

Event: “Explained: Natural Gas and World’s Largest Methanol Refinery”

  • Speakers: Eric de Place, Sightline Institute policy director; Dr. Mark Vossler, Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility; John Flynn, local Kalama activist
  • Where: University Friends Meeting, 4001 9th Ave NE, Seattle, Washington 98105 (map)
  • When: Monday, April 24, 2017, 6:30 – 8:00 PM (RSVP here)
  • Sponsor: Sierra Club
  • The event is free and open to the public; childcare will be provided.

Want to help spread the word? You can do so on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks in advance!

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

 

Northwest Coal Terminals’ Last Stand

Even before amendments come in about its environmental impacts, the last of six coal terminals proposed for the Pacific Northwest is on the ropes, having been denied a crucial sublease by the Washington Department of Natural Resources. And the coal dust it would release into the surroundings may be the final nail in its coffin.

The coal dust it would release into the surroundings may be the final nail in its coffin.
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First proposed in 2012 at a projected cost of $680 million, the Millennium Bulk Terminal on the Columbia River in Longview, Washington, was designed to ship up to 48 million tons (44 million metric tons) of coal annually. As expected, terminal advocates touted the family-wage jobs it would bring to the area, while ignoring or dismissing adverse impacts such as climate change, train noise, traffic blockages, and coal dust. “If complaints continue about dust, we will know it’s a device just to deceive,” said Millennium executive Bill Chapman. “Facts do matter.”

As a Ph.D. physicist and science historian, I agree. Facts indeed matter. And when it comes to estimating fugitive coal dust—that which escapes from trains and port operations into the surroundings—I could not find very many of them when I looked deeply into the draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the project, which is supposed to provide detailed factual information about its environmental risks. There was unsupported conjecture aplenty, but few well-founded facts.

As I explained at length in my formal comments on the DEIS, the official analysis seriously underestimates releases of fugitive coal dust from the Longview facility by a factor of between 2.4 and 4.2. Releases from individual operations within the terminal—for example, from coal-pile wind erosion—are low-balled by factors of up to 7. And some dust-generating processes, such as bulldozing the storage piles and trucks driving on terminal roads, are completely ignored, so the underestimates must be even worse.

I had to dig deeply to get at the underlying “facts,” which were not easily accessible. The crucial calculations of fugitive coal dust emissions rates, performed by subcontractor URS Corporation, curiously cannot be located on the project’s official web site; only a summary of these calculations can be found there. For the details, I had to specifically request other documents from the Washington Department of Ecology, including several appendices in which these calculations were finally presented.

How did the environmental analysis end up with such large underestimates of fugitive coal dust? For one, the authors used unwarranted and optimistic physical parameters in their emissions calculations. Compounding this problem, they applied unjustified and unreasonably high efficiencies for dust-control measures (such as watering the coal piles). For example, URS Corporation used the lowest possible value, 2.2 percent, for the coal silt content in estimating fugitive dust from wind erosion of the storage piles rather than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s standard value of 8.6 percent for western surface coal, thereby underestimating the dust loss by a factor of 3.9. And the authors then applied a high efficiency factor of 95 percent for watering the coal piles without sufficiently justifying their use of such an optimistic number. Taken together, these unwarranted and unsupported assumptions yielded coal dust estimates that are probably low by nearly an order of magnitude.

Apparently no one involved actually checked these estimates by comparing them with operating experience at other coal terminals. There were trains loaded with Powder River Basin coal rumbling past Longview almost daily, for example, but nobody seemed to have thought to obtain a few samples of this coal and actually measure the silt content. Instead, URS Corporation engineers cherry-picked the smallest value they could find in tables published by EPA and used that number in their calculations. Good, professional engineers and scientists establish facts by comparing tentative hypotheses and calculations with real, measured data. This was not done for the Longview terminal’s fugitive coal dust estimates.

Also improperly treated in the Longview DEIS was the loss of coal and the fugitive coal dust generated during the ship-loading process. This has proved to be one of the largest sources of coal dust at other terminals I have examined, such as those in Delta and Prince Rupert, British Columbia; Duluth, Minnesota; and Seward, Alaska. As much as half the total coal losses from these terminals occur during ship loading, and almost all of those losses end up in the waters below, either drifting away with the currents or sinking to the bottom and contaminating it.

The URS Corporation calculations lumped the ship-loading losses together with other losses from the entire coal conveyor system (which transfers coal from storage piles to the ship holds) and obtained total emissions of only 5.25 tons per year, again assuming a high 95 percent efficiency factor. But when I calculated just the ship-loading losses using reasonable values for wind speeds, coal moisture content, and dust-suppression efficiency, I obtained 5.9 tons per year for that operation alone. And essentially all of that coal would drop directly into the Columbia River.

A good example of what happens during ship loading can be found at the Westshore Terminals in Delta, BC, on the Salish Sea just north of the border. That port can load up to 33 million metric tons annually, so it’s roughly equivalent in coal-loading volume to the proposed Longview terminal. And it uses similar loading technologies, with the ship-loading tube extending well down into the carrier holds to try to minimize escaping dust. But a comprehensive 2006 examination of the coal losses at Westshore revealed coal accumulations on the sea floor near the piers that exceeded 10 percent of the natural sediments found there, and the dominant portion of that coal came in grains too large to have drifted very far.

A revealing photograph of a bulk carrier being loaded at Westshore shows what actually happens during the ship-loading process. Winds blowing over the holds suck coal dust up and out of them due to the famous Bernoulli effect, which physicists and aeronautical engineers all recognize. Some of this dust is then deposited on the deck while the rest drops directly into the waters below, drifting away on the currents. Lummi Nation fishers working south of the terminal have witnessed and photographed this process, too.

Coal dust on deck of a bulk carrier being loaded at Westshore Terminals. Photo by Paul K. Anderson (used with permission).

Take a closer look at this photograph, particularly at the small pile of coal in the foreground. This is coal lost due to human error when the operator moves the ship-loader from one hold to the next, as is done many, many times during loading to keep the vessel balanced. It is coarse-grained coal just like that found on the sea floor adjacent to the terminal’s piers.

In the Longview terminal’s fugitive-dust analysis, the DEIS authors made no serious attempt to account for coal-spillage losses due to human error. From what I can tell, in fact, the URS Corporation engineers included only wind-driven dust with tiny grain sizes less than 10 micrometers. Such a glaring omission leads to another gross underestimate of the coal losses, particularly those that would occur at the piers and fall directly into the Columbia River, sinking to the bottom and contaminating nearby shorelines.

All told, including realistic wind-driven losses plus those arising from operator error, I estimate that between 10 and 15 tons of coal would enter the Columbia annually—the equivalent of a full dump truck load—if the terminal were to operate at its peak capacity of 48 million tons per year. Although that corresponds to only about a tenth of a teaspoonful per ton of coal loaded, it really adds up when loading so many millions of tons annually. And that doesn’t include losses from other kinds of mishaps, such as a carrier collision with the pier or conveyor system, as happened at Westshore in December 2012.

I estimate that between 10 and 15 tons of coal would enter the Columbia annually.
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In general, based on actual operating experience at other comparable coal terminals like Westshore, we should expect the Longview facility to release between 6 and 10 tons of coal for every million tons loaded. That’s less than a measly 0.001 percent. But if we apply those figures to the maximum Longview capacity, we obtain overall coal losses of 290 to 480 tons per year. Even if we optimistically assume that the Longview terminal’s coal-loading efficiency could somehow be improved so much that losses of only 0.0001 percent occur, or less than half a teaspoonful per ton, that still adds up to 48 tons per year. That’s more than four times as much as the 11 tons that was estimated in the draft EIS for the Millennium Bulk Terminal—and at least a quarter of that would end up in the Columbia River.

Yes, indeed, facts do matter. But there is little reason to believe that the public has been given real facts—grounded in solid evidence based on observation and measurements—about how much coal dust the Longview terminal would actually release. To the contrary, an honest, detailed examination reveals that the Longview terminal is likely to be a major source of air and water pollution to the surrounding community and especially to the Columbia River. These are the facts we should be heeding, not the “alternative facts” peddled by Bill Chapman and the coal export industry.

Michael Riordan is the author or coauthor of five books, including The Solar Home Book, The Hunting of the Quark, and most recently Tunnel Visions. He writes about science, technology and public policy from his home on Orcas Island, Washington.

Weekend Reading 4/14/17

Alan

It’s just three weeks now since Cascadia lost Alex Dold, another young man killed by the combination of untreated mental illness, untrained police, and a broken mental health care system. Alex, 29, fell into crisis and—haunted by the demons created by his mental illness—became a danger to himself and his family. Desperate to protect him, his loved ones called 911. The officers who responded, unequipped to de-escalate a mental health crisis and unfairly expected to fill the hole where our mental health care system ought to be, used their Taser. Alex died.

To be sure, we need better police training—one-quarter of people killed by police last year in the United States were in the grips of the extreme mind states caused by mental illness—but we need much more than that. We need to build a civilized mental health care system. Ten times as many Americans with severe mental illnesses are currently locked in jails and prisons as are recovering in residential psychiatric care facilities. Cascadia can do better.

To gain insight into this crisis, I especially recommend the first chapter of “My Damn Mind,” on the This American Life podcast. It is a revealing look behind the veil at the extreme states of mind that afflict about one in every hundred adults, sufferers of bipolar and schizophrenia. A young Haitian-American man named Alan Pean narrates one of his own manic episodes and the tragedy that it unleashes: he admits himself to a Houston hospital seeking care and ends up handcuffed, Tasered, and shot in the chest by untrained security guards. The New York Times did a feature on the same incident and the larger trend of shootings and mental illness in hospitals.

“Five ways to reduce racial bias in your children” seems well-grounded in research.

Serena

A fresh profile of searingly smart and politically acerbic speculative fiction author Margaret Atwood? Yes, please. The “prophet of dystopia” gets a deep and well-timed exploration of her writing, her feminism, her reflections on our dark political moment, and her hopes—yes, hopes—for our shared future.

Last summer, Rahawa Haile, hiked the Appalachian Trail. She writes for Outside Magazine about the experience of being a queer Black woman in the AT space, moving between Trump-sign-dotted and Confederate-flag-adorned towns, enduring the obliviousness of white fellow hikers, and simply making it through that physically grueling challenge. I tried to pick an excerpt to include here, but the whole thing is so great, I just recommend you read it in full.

One of The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day picks this week was this Sherman Alexie gem, “The Powwow at the End of the World.”

Eric

Archeologists discovered a 14,000-year-old village site in British Columbia. It’s one of the oldest settlements ever found in North America.

This week, I finished two excellent books. On Trails, by Robert Moor, is anchored by his experience hiking the Appalachian Trail, but it expands to becomes a wonderful examination of the ways that trails (and trail-making) shape living organisms and, indeed, whole civilizations.

Nietzsche once wrote that “we have art in order not to die from the truth.” That line appears as an epigraph to one chapter of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and I think it captures the careful and mysterious beauty of her story. It lives up to its Pulitzer Prize-winning hype: the characters are astonishingly well-drawn and the dramatic sequences are almost hypnotic. I’m not even sure whether I regret that I listened to an audio version of it. The prose surely deserves more careful attention than listening, but the narration by David Pittu is nothing short of masterful.

Aven

As I sit down to go over the news items that caught my attention this week, the sun is shining through my window, and Seattle is gearing up for not one, but two giant protest marches this weekend. This, combined with the abundance of hopeful articles I’ve been reading, has left me feeling ever so slightly optimistic about the future—a welcome change of pace from the literal doom and gloom that have characterized the present over the last several months.

For one thing, it’s starting to seem likely that the Republican Party of the near future may actually be run by reasonable people who have a minimal respect for science. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a majority of current college Republicans both believe in man-made climate change and think we have a moral obligation to do something about it. Notably, “the University of Pennsylvania’s College Republicans called it ‘ludicrous’ to suggest the climate is not changing or that humans are not driving that change,” while Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo states: “I get thanked by young Republicans over and over again for my engagement on the topic of climate change and other environmental policies. This is the generation that’s going to ironically take us back to a time when environmental protection was not a partisan issue.” Here’s hoping.

Until then, however, thank goodness for Congressmen Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, who has filed a lawsuit seeking to delay the much-hyped US-Mexico border wall by requiring an environmental impact analysis before construction can begin. These analyses tend to take years to complete and cost a lot of money. Since Mexico is still refusing to pay for the wall, and other funding for the expensive project has yet to materialize, this might just be one less bad decision we’ll have to deal with later.

One last hopeful note: according to FiveThirtyEight, the recent attacks on the EPA may not actually mean that much for environmental protection in the long run.  Researchers who’ve studied past governments that were hostile to their own environmental regulatory agencies, including that of Ronald Reagan, have found that “these efforts, while damaging to the environment in some cases, don’t seem to have led to long-term, universal reductions in environmental quality. Instead… the results have mainly come in the form of slower progress on environmental protections and the exacerbation of regional differences as local governments respond to changes in federal policy.” All the more important to keep up the good work here so that we can provide a model for change once the federal government catches up to reality.

John

The Wildlife Services of the US Department of Agriculture uses M-44 “Cyanide bombs” to kill livestock predators in the western United States. But when a teenager near Pocatello, Idaho, accidentally triggered one device, it harmed the boy and killed his dog. That got the attention of Pocatello Mayor Brian Blad, Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen, and a coalition of conservation organizations. As a result of the public attention, the Wildlife Services agreed to remove M-44 devices from Idaho—at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the coalition of organizations seeks a national ban on the M-44 and similar devices.

In the science category, the New Yorker ran this article on two NASA engineers who decided to become politically active. On a similar topic, Grist reported that the March for Science organizers plan to continue activities after the March on Earth Day, April 22. Events on that day are now planned in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. If readers are interested, they can find an April 22 event nearby.

In a positive development in “coal’s War on the health of humans and other living things,” Grist reported that Pacific Rim Coal suspended all permitting efforts on its proposed Chuitna, Alaska, coal mine, because the company could not find investors to finance the project.

For that matter, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign and Bloomberg Philanthropies maintain a running tally of US coal power plants that have been retired, or announced a planned retirement. The total has been steadily rising, with the current count at 251 coal plants. Their map and other information can be found here.

John Abbotts is a former Sightline research consultant who occasionally submits material for Weekend Reading and other posts.

Talking Taxes: Six Tips to Shift the Story This Tax Day

We generally think of taxes in terms of “me,” not “us.”

But one thing that Donald Trump has delivered to the US mainstream is an, ahem… unusually lively conversation about taxes—even a rare discussion about why they’re important. We’ve heard everything from the so-called “genius” of high-powered business people using loopholes to avoid taxes to heartfelt declarations that taxes are a patriotic duty to the many ways the system is broken.

Bernie Sanders summed it up (of course, this was before November 8): “I have been running all over this country for a year-and-a-half talking about a corrupt tax system. And in one day, Donald Trump did more to explain the corrupt tax system to the American people than I did in a year-and-a-half. Thank you, Donald.” As John Cassidy put it in the New Yorker, the scandal wasn’t Trump not paying taxes or even not saying how much he paid; “The scandal, instead, is what he was able to do lawfully thanks to the structure of the tax code.”

The good news: Americans see taxes as a way to invest in the country and our communities (at least when prompted). Most folks also understand that things are broken when big fellas get to broker special deals.

And of course, the American tax conversation has been renewed this month with GOP rumblings about overhauling the federal tax code and subsequent questions about Trump’s own tax returns and potential conflicts of interest moving forward. Meanwhile, in Cascadian states like Washington, leaders are deciding the budget, and local taxpayers—and people in at least 140 communities around the country—are gearing up for public demonstrations on Tax Day.

Now is the perfect opportunity to share an excellent messaging resource from our friends at Fuse Washington Communications Hub. Based on extensive interview and survey research in Washington State and building on nationwide research conducted by public interest communications strategy firm Topos, these strategies reflect the real attitudes and voices of Americans.

6 Tips for Talking Taxes

  1. Start with the common good. We all benefit from taxes—but we need reminders. Focusing only on specific groups (seniors, kids, the poor) can trigger “me” and “them” thinking. Shift to“us” and “we” by starting with shared benefits and “thriving communities.”
  2. Give concrete examples of the “foundations” of thriving communities. Give examples of the public systems and institutions on which we build our health, prosperity, and quality of life: excellent schools, first responders, clean water, transit, parks, and libraries.
  3. Highlight big-picture priorities, not process. Taxes and dollars aren’t the end goals. Highlight the community benefits that taxes deliver.
  4. Play up aspirations, achievements, and local pride—not problems. Talk up achievements and goals, not shortfalls. Stir up local pride in both place and progress. Show that with the money to do it, we can do great things and make people’s lives better.
  5. Focus on cleaning up our tax code. Loopholes and special deals drain public investments that benefit everybody. Cleaning up unlocks resources, holds those at the top accountable, and shifts blame from government.
  6. It’s manipulation we don’t like, not wealth. It’s okay to be rich. It’s wrong for powerful special interests to get away with manipulating the tax code to serve themselves.

Here’s an example of how All In Washington combines these powerful messages into a concise narrative. (The text below is paraphrased. Be sure to check out the group’s explainer video for the whole story.)

We take pride in our state. There’s nowhere we’d rather live. We have proven we can do great things. We are at our best when no one is left behind. But our innovative spirit hasn’t come through in our tax code. In fact, Washington’s tax code is the most upside-down in the nation. In other words, we ask the Washingtonians with the least to contribute a far greater share of their incomes—as much as seven times what those at the top pay—while powerful special interests get a special deal. Our tax code doesn’t reflect our values.

Taxes are how we all chip in to build foundations for strong, thriving communities and do things together that we could never do alone, like build great schools, roads, and bridges, or train and pay firefighters and librarians! It’s how we create the infrastructure for an economy that works for all of us and that makes possible a strong middle class. We can unlock the resources our communities need by cleaning up the hundreds of special deals that powerful interests and the wealthy have forced into the tax code.

Tax Day is fast approaching. Let us know how you cut through the IRS sniping and partisan posturing to talk about how we all build thriving communities together!

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Would you like to have a kid in the next year?

Northwest women say that almost half of their pregnancies are mistimed or unwanted.
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In contrast with Europe and Canada, the Pacific Northwest faces an epidemic of surprise pregnancy. Northwest women say that almost half of their pregnancies are mistimed or unwanted. This causes hardship in the lives of the region’s families and makes it difficult to give children the best possible start in life. With unintended pregnancy so common and the consequences so big, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists now recommends that health care providers check pregnancy desires at every visit with reproductive-age women and, when appropriate, offer “whoops-proof” IUDs and implants that work 20 times better than the pill.

But pressures on providers make this tough. Clinicians are swamped with ever more tasks and topics to cover and ever smaller chunks of time in which to address them all. Even those who would prefer a whole-person approach often don’t know whether and when a patient might want to have a kid, which means they can’t help a prospective parent prepare for healthy babies. Now, a small Oregon non-profit has come up with a simple innovation may change that.

One Key Question

The Oregon Foundation for Reproductive Health, based in Portland, developed a remarkably simple screening technique called One Key Question® (OKQ). It fits into busy schedules and can be completed by clinic assistants—or maybe eventually a waiting room app. The one key question is this: “Would you like to become pregnant in the next year?” The clinician documents one of four patient responses: Yes, I’m okay either way, I’m not sure, or No, which then guides next steps.

Patients who say yes receive preconception counseling about how they can stack the odds in favor of a healthy pregnancy by improving nutrition, avoiding toxins, and addressing chronic conditions or stress. Patients who feel uncertain or ambivalent (I don’t know or I’m okay either way) get information about preconception care as well as family planning options. A response of no leads to just the conversation about family planning. It creates an opportunity to check satisfaction with a patient’s current method and explore methods like IUDs and implants that might better fit patient goals but are less familiar. Inexpensive posters and tear sheets from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unintended Pregnancy and a color-coded medical eligibility chart from the CDC make it easy for providers to walk a patient through the options.

As shown in the figure below, of 1,847 US women asked One Key Question in a 2015 study, almost seven in ten women responded to One Key Question with “no.” Ten percent each responded with “yes,” “I’m not sure,” or “I’m okay either way.”

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Promising beginnings

Although One Key Question is relatively new, early feedback from clinicians looks promising, and it has caught the attention of experts nationwide. One example is the state of Delaware, where Governor Jack Markell partnered with Upstream USA to retool contraceptive care statewide, so that women can receive the method of their choice on the same day, free of charge—including IUDs and implants. The statewide contraceptive care upgrade, called Delaware CAN, has trained caregivers serving over 50,000 women in 60 different clinical settings.

In Oregon, OKQ is deployed in a variety of settings, from home visits and food assistance to primary care. A pilot project at One Community Health compared two major health centers, one in which OKQ was implemented and one in which it was not. After just one month, 64 percent of electronic medical records for the OKQ-practicing site documented appropriate screening for pregnancy desires, compared to 12 percent at the non-OKQ site.

Challenges remain

Even clinicians who would like to improve reproductive outcomes for their patients will need evidence that adopting a screening protocol such as One Key Question will make patient care easier in the long run, and more satisfying—rather than simply adding one more thing to an already overwhelming to-do list.

Cultural dynamics create a different type of challenge. Sexuality and reproduction can be sensitive topics for providers as well as patients. In particular, those women who are young, poor, ethnic minorities, or in ill health can feel shamed or pressured unless conversations are carefully client-centered. That said, a strong majority do not want to get pregnant in the next year, and many women say that they appreciate being asked.

Health centers that want to use OKQ in a systematic and routine way face logistical challenges incorporating the OKQ algorithm into varying electronic health records. In Oregon, OCHIN, a company providing health information technology, has incorporated the question and answers into the EPIC electronic record used across their network. But other systems use other platforms, so not all providers would get prompted to make a simple note of a woman’s pregnancy intentions.

Keys to success

To ensure program excellence and compatibility of evaluation across settings, the non-profit Oregon Foundation for Reproductive Health trademarked One Key Question and asks for a signed memorandum of understanding prior to implementation. In settings that have adopted OKQ, success tends to follow a specific set of best practices. These include training the whole health center team prior to roll-out, adjusting workflow, updating protocols and referral lists for preconception or family-planning care, and building a plan to evaluate impact.

Of course, it only makes sense to ask about what people want if clinicians then have services to offer. One Key Question can reveal gaps in service capacity that require other kinds of staff training or upgrades in the healthcare system as a whole. Fortunately, several great models show how it can be done. I recently wrote about the Colorado Initiative to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy, which dramatically reduced teen pregnancy and abortion by improving access to implants and IUDs. Delaware, which once had the highest rate of unintended pregnancy in the country, is now making similar changes with help from Upstream USA. The “Beyond the Pill” program at University of California San Francisco offers onsite trainings to individual clinics wanting to upgrade contraceptive services, with grant funding for those that qualify.

No change is effortless, but some changes make life easier and better in the long run, and this seems to be one of them.

To learn more about One Key Question or to sign up for a monthly newsletter, please contact info@onekeyquestion.org.

 

Is Canadian Tar Sands Pipeline Pointing to Tacoma?

If built, the new pipeline would mean 348 more tankers plying Northwest waters each year, threatening spills throughout the region.
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If energy giant Kinder Morgan gets its way, British Columbia will soon be home to a new $7.4 billion oil pipeline carrying 590,000 barrels of Alberta oil per day to an export terminal near Vancouver, BC, on the Salish Sea. The Canadian federal government recently approved the proposal, and it is now likely the single biggest threat to the Northwest’s thin green line, the opposition movement that has staved off countless coal, oil, and fracked gas schemes around the region. If built, the new pipeline would mean 348 more tankers plying Northwest waters each year, threatening spills throughout the region.

Threats to Northwest waters

To date, most of the concern about spills from oil tankers has centered on the ecological riches of the San Juan Islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the main shipping corridors for planning exports. But in truth, the pipeline expansion will also endanger the most populated parts of Washington: the core Puget Sound region stretching from the Fraser River to Commencement Bay. That’s because a portion of the exceptionally polluting tar sands oil served by the new pipeline would be delivered by sea to Tacoma.

Tar sands oil is already shipped to the City of Destiny in the South Sound. According to a groundbreaking April 2016 report by Fred Felleman with Friends of the Earth, the US Oil refinery there received a minimum of 10 million barrels of heavy Canadian crude between 2010 and 2014. (As the report notes, the shipments were handled by Sause Brothers, the same tug boat operator responsible for the 1988 Nestucca oil spill disaster in Grays Harbor, Washington.) That works out to roughly one loaded oil barge per week making the passage from Burnaby, British Columbia, through some of the most ecologically (and economically) important waters in the Northwest: Rosario Strait in the San Juan Islands, Admiralty Inlet between Whidbey Island and Port Townsend, and then past Edmonds, Seattle, Bainbridge Island, and Vashon Island, before reaching Commencement Bay.

According to 2010 documents from Canada’s National Energy Board uncovered by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which opposes the expansion project, Tacoma’s refinery is among five shippers that have signed ten-year “take or pay” contracts to ship a share of 54,000 barrels from the Trans Mountain Pipeline. And transcripts of hearings with Canadian federal regulators show that representatives from Tacoma’s refinery have been lobbying in support of the pipeline expansion. They argue that more tar sands flowing to the Salish Sea would benefit them directly. Rather than competing with the larger northern Sound refineries that are connected by pipeline to the Trans Mountain Pipeline system, an expansion would free up enough oil for Tacoma to obtain a larger and more predictable share that would be delivered by vessel.

Such a plan poses a huge risk because tar sands spills are notoriously difficult to clean up. Although the Washington Department of Ecology has begun studying cleanup techniques for heavy oil, there’s little question that a spill could do profound damage to the region’s environmental and economic wellbeing.

Complicating cleanup preparation is the fact that the industry keeps secret the exact composition of the product. Known as “dilbit” (or diluted bitumen) in the industry, the fuel is composed of dense and sticky bitumen blended with a stew of chemicals and light petroleum products that render it transportable and usable in a refinery. It’s highly toxic, difficult to predict and contain during a spill, and not well understood even by experts.

The Kalamazoo tar sands spill example

Consider what happened during the best known tar sands spill in the US, when a pipeline ruptured near the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Once in the river, the constituent parts of the oil separated—the lighter “diluents” evaporated, while the heavier bitumen sank, rendering useless most conventional spill cleanup techniques, like booming and skimming. Instead, cleanup crews had to resort to a time-consuming and expensive process of “poling”—that is, sticking a long pole into the river bottom to dislodge and measure the buildup of bitumen—and dredging.

In aftermath of the spill, the Kalamazoo River became a case study in the challenges of cleaning up tar sands oil. When exposed to sunlight on land or the riverbank, the bitumen formed a dense, sticky substance, likened by some local residents to chewing gum, which was very difficult to remove from rock and sediments. Michigan state officials closed fishing, swimming, and boating on the river and forced 150 families from their homes for the duration of the cleanup. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) found in the bitumen caused extremely foul odors and led to headaches, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting in local residents. The spill killed hundreds of birds and other animals, including many freshwater turtles, while locals took thousands more to wildlife rehabilitation centers.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 180,000 gallons of bitumen remain in the river, of which 90 percent will likely persist even after the company responsible completes dredging about 540,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment from the river bed. The Kalamazoo River might be seen as a warning signal for Puget Sound. And it’s a warning that may be difficult to heed owing to huge federal funding cuts for Puget Sound restoration looming in President Trump’s proposed budget.

There have been more local warnings, too. In 2004, in the waters between Point Defiance and Vashon Island, known as Dalco Passage, a vessel leaked or spilled a relatively small amount of oil. Yet patches of oily sheen drifted as far south as the Tacoma Narrows and as far north as Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island. Officials closed parks on Vashon and Maury islands and suspended shellfish and seaweed harvesting as cleanup crews worked to recover an estimated 59 tons of oily debris from the shorelines and 6,842 gallons of oily water with skimming operations.

Other Puget Sound spills are illustrative, too, from Point Wells to Fidalgo Head to Padilla Bay. Yet none of them was nearly as destructive as a large tar sands spill, such as that threatened by the Kinder Morgan expansion, could be for beaches and wildlife. It’s a risk that will weigh on Seattle, Tacoma, and many other Puget Sound communities when Kinder Morgan begins work on the new pipeline later in 2017.

Weekend Reading 4/7/17

Alan

Dave Roberts’ long article about the rise of what he calls “tribal epistemology” is my lead pick for what you should read. In tribal epistemology,

Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one.

It’s a masterful tour of the challenge, and it’s honest enough to admit that the path back to universal knowledge—verified by evidence and testable with logic—remains uncharted. Sobering but essential reading (and critical for a think tank like Sightline to grapple with).

A perhaps-contrarian view of this week’s nuking of the filibuster in the US Senate. Whatever you think of Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch (I’m no fan), the filibuster’s days have been numbered since Harry Reid first deployed the “nuclear option” in 2013 (a change we celebrated here). The remaining filibuster—for legislation rather than Supreme Court confirmations—will die too in the next few years, I predict. Once the ruling party had changed the rules by simple majority, it was inevitable the other party would too when in power. In the near term, that’s bad for progressives and good for conservatives, but in the long run, it’s a huge win for American democracy and for Cascadian sustainability. The filibuster empowers low-population states against large-population ones, as Rocky Barker, dean of environmental reporters in the inland Northwest, noted in the Idaho Statesman. Demographically, that skew favors older, whiter, rural, more-conservative US voters—not the vanguard of a sustainable future. More fundamentally, the change to sustainability requires sweeping policy changes, and the filibuster is a colossal brake on change of all types. Steven Waldman spells out a brief articulation of this case here, and I wrote extensively about it a few years ago in this series.

Anna

The Tampa Bay Times examined every Florida police shooting from 2009 to 2014. They found that blacks were more likely to be shot than whites. Specifically, blacks were more likely to be shot in situations where they were unarmed, not wearing a seatbelt or pulled over for other minor traffic violations, being chased on foot (e.g. running away), or suspected of a minor, non-violent crime. Blacks were four times more likely to be shot in the back. It’s important research, in part because these data are not always easy to track down. See the powerful slide show here. You can also listen to a two-part Radiolab podcast on this research and the local context here.

In Holland, straight men are holding hands to show solidarity with gay men subject to harassment and attacks.

And, some click bait I was glad I bit (sorry…puns). Stunning drone footage of an Alaska salmon run from Lake Iliamna. (Beware: annoying popups and dreamy scenery).

Aven

In my continuing quest to find hopeful news, I came across this article about how a positive outlook is good for your health. So, in an effort to do my part for public health, here are a couple articles that gave me a little optimism boost this week:

According to researchers in the Journal of Mammology, the best way to minimize livestock predation by wolves is to coexist. Over the course of the years-long study, not only did non-lethal wolf control methods prove to be more effective, sheep mortality rates in the wolf-killing control group came out to a full 3 ½ times higher than in the live-and-let-live study area. Coming right on the heels of a petition calling for a ban on the predator-killing cyanide traps that recently killed a pet dog and injured a 14 year old boy in eastern Idaho, this couldn’t be better news for wildlife in the West.

On the other side of the country, there’s a very interesting special election happening in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, until recently held by the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price. In a district that hasn’t voted for a democrat in decades and which re-elected Mr. Price just last November with 62% of the vote, a 30 year-old neophyte Democrat is making his 11 Republican competitors very nervous. It will be an interesting one to watch.

Kristin E.

Research suggests women are “better at creating value through collaborative exchanges.” Women are more likely to seek mutually beneficial solutions that value all parties’ interests. But to succeed in careers, women are urged to act on more traditionally masculine values, such as a focus on profit and self-interest. But if enough women work together, they can steer organizations in a more “ethically sustainable” direction.

I’m a few chapters in to the fascinating book Democracy for Realists which, so far, is making a pretty convincing argument that voters vote based on their tribe (usually, their political party, their race or ethnicity, or their religion) and not based on policy preferences or evidence. Put another way: people decide which party they are a part of and then favor the policies that party espouses, rather than looking at evidence to decide which policies they like and then favoring the party that espouses those policies. (Pretty easy to see recently: Amercians’ views of Russia are driven by their partisan affiliation, not the other way around). Matthew Yglesias has a somewhat alarming summary of the book that emphasizes the “voters are inattentive and uninformed” piece of the story.

Eric

I missed last week’s shower of rain-related reading contributions, but it seems that T. S. Eliot was right: April is the cruelest month, and the downpours are still with us.

It’s no wonder that when the poet Denise Levertov moved to Seattle, she penned these words:

Now I am given
a taste of the grey foretold by all and sundry,
a grey both heavy and chill. I’ve boasted I would not care,
I’m London-born. And I won’t. I’ll dig in,
into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.
Grey is the price
of neighboring with eagles, of knowing
a mountain’s vast presence, seen or unseen.

Plus, good news for those who exercise outdoors in this cold damp climate, a Swedish brewer has improved one of life’s finest pleasures with a beer meant solely for drinking in the shower.

Keiko

How do we move forward with environmental justice in the era of Trump? Grist collects wisdom from important environmental justice leaders.

Progressive City highlights persistent planning inequalities and exclusionary practices, and explores what placemaking would look like when Black lives matter. Here are a few words from Washington DC’s director of planning on Park(ing) Day, an annual worldwide event that transforms parking spots into temporary public spaces, “I’ve told my staff that PARK(ing) Day is really nice. But if five black males took over a parking spot and had a barbecue and listened to music . . . would they last 10 minutes? Who gets to ‘disrupt’ the public space paradigm, and who gets arrested for disturbing the peace?”

John

Jon Talton, an economics columnist for The Seattle Times, listens to the “99 percent.” In a recent piece, he attacks the canard of “job-killing regulations.” He points out that forcing giant corporations to be better neighbors protects public health, and can create jobs.

In the “climate change is already with us category,” the New York Times ran this article describing how wildfires in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas have killed cattle, and the burdened ranchers feel that their government has abandoned them. Those interviewed were family ranchers, not owners of “factory farms” with tens of thousands of livestock, generating millions of gallons of liquid manure per year, such as the controversial giant dairies in eastern Oregon.

Also in the New York Times, in the “atomic power is not a climate solution category,” is a report on the radioactive rubble, still being generated during cleanup, that must be managed from the Fukushima reactor accident.

On the same topic, Westinghouse, now a subsidiary of Toshiba of Japan, filed for bankruptcy because of huge losses from atomic plant construction. The projects include an uncompleted reactor in Georgia, for which the US Department of Energy granted over $8 billion in loan guarantees. Westinghouse’s bankruptcy may mean that taxpayers will be stuck with that bill.

In some good news, the Times also ran an article about Diego, a very prolific Galapagos giant tortoise, who has rescued his species from the brink of extinction.

John Abbotts is a former Sightline research consultant who occasionally submits material for Weekend Reading and other posts.

Coal Exports: After the Crash, Now What?

Asia’s formerly red-hot coal market has cooled off, making the costly new mine a financial dud.
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Another month, another coal export project down the tubes. This time it’s the proposed Chuitna mine in Alaska, a controversial export project launched a few years ago near the peak in the Pacific Rim coal bubble. After submitting several thousand pages of permitting documentation, the project backers had no choice but to shelve the project after the main investor pulled out—no doubt disheartened that Asia’s formerly red-hot coal market has cooled off, making the costly new mine a financial dud.

It’s yet another sign that West Coast coal export projects—once a Wall Street darling—are now on the ropes. Just last month Cloud Peak Energy, a major coal producer in the vast Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, revealed that it had jettisoned its long-term commitments to Asian exports. The company paid some money to exit its long-term shipping contracts, while simply abandoning its property interest in the now-canceled Gateway Pacific terminal outside of Bellingham, Washington.

Cloud Peak’s decision to withdraw from exports raises an important question: what will happen to the mines that Cloud Peak once counted on to supply its export ambitions?

For years Cloud Peak has sourced its export coal from the company’s Spring Creek mine in southern Montana. A few years back, when the company envisioned that it could ship tens of millions of tons of coal per year to Asian power plants, Cloud Peak started to develop two new export-mines near Spring Creek: the Youngs Creek mine in northern Wyoming, and the Big Metal project on Crow Nation territory in Montana.

But the collapse of Asian markets has placed all three of these mines in jeopardy.

The Spring Creek mine could be in for some rocky times starting in 2019. Cloud Peak still expects to export 5 million tons of Spring Creek coal in 2017 and 2018—but after that, the company will likely dip in and out of the export markets, shipping coal overseas only when prices are high. Meanwhile, Spring Creek only has a handful of domestic customers, many of whom are closing shop in the next 8 years:

Several other coal plants that used to purchase Spring Creek coal have already closed. All told, about half of the generating capacity at the mine’s regular customers will be out of service by 2025. Spring Creek production already fell by nearly half between 2010 and 2016, but the combination of shrinking export opportunities and a collapsing domestic customer base could squeeze Spring Creek production even further.

Cloud Peak may have few options for preventing the collapse of Spring Creek production. In the company’s last investor call, Cloud Peak’s CEO admitted that the company had already started to fish around for additional domestic customers for Spring Creek coal. But finding new buyers could be an uphill battle: Spring Creek coal is high in sodium, which can corrode power plant boilers—meaning that few domestic power plants can use significant amounts of the coal. Just a few years ago, the company’s CEO admitted that the domestic market for Spring Creak coal is “finite,” which made it impossible for the company to switch the mine’s export sales over to domestic markets.

Worse, all of Cloud Peak’s rivals—particularly the super-giants newly emerging from bankruptcy—are gearing up for a fierce battle for the shrinking pot of domestic customers. Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the CEO of Peabody Energy, which just emerged from bankruptcy after writing off $5 billion in debt, believes that boosting market share is one key to the company’s long-term success. So even as Cloud Peak is hoping to find new buyers for Spring Creek coal, all of its low-cost rivals are doing the same thing.

With Spring Creek already staring at a bleak future, it’s hard to see why Cloud Peak would rush to develop its two nearby mining projects. At a minimum, reduced demand for Spring Creek coal will allow the mine’s existing reserves to last a lot longer; at worst, Cloud Peak could decide to close Spring Creek well before it exhausts the mine’s remaining coal. Either way, the decline in Spring Creek’s market will likely prod Cloud Peak to put the Youngs Creek and Big Metal projects on the back burner.

But there’s one more reason for Cloud Peak to delay developing the new mines: the Administration’s recent decision to reopen federal coal to new private leases. As Reuters and Bloomberg have pointed out, the US coal industry is swimming in excess reserves, and has little appetite for new federal coal. There hasn’t been a successful federal coal lease in the Powder River Basin since 2012, and the last two coal leases offered in the Powder River Basin both failed: one received no bids, and the other received a single bid that the BLM rejected as too stingy. Nonetheless, opening up federal coal leasing will create even more low-cost competition for Cloud Peak’s new mines.

Ironically, then, the steps the administration is taking to please the coal industry may actually undermine Cloud Peak’s plans for the Northern PRB. And that irony has a cruel streak. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has repeatedly pointed to the plight of the Crow Nation—which depends heavily on revenue from coal mines on tribal land—as justification for his pro-coal stance. And yet his decision to lift the coal leasing moratorium may actually have boosted the prospects of the Crow’s fiercest competitors, undermining his promise to help the nation get more of its coal to market. It’s yet another demonstration that the new administration has made promises to coal country that it has neither the ability nor the intention to fulfill.

The Potential of an “Oregon Climate Test”

After a string of successes defending the Northwest from ill-conceived dirty energy projects, the thin green line—the Northwest’s opposition movement to coal, oil, and gas exports—is starting to play offense. Local governments around the region are already updating land use laws to protect their communities from the depredations of fossil fuel infrastructure schemes. Now, a new bill in the Oregon legislature aims to raise the bar for the corporations proposing these developments—like would-be coal shipper Kinder Morgan or propane exporter Pembina Pipeline—by holding them accountable for their impact on the global climate.

Unlike in Washington, where large-scale projects must undergo a rigorous environmental impact analysis, including examining their potential for greenhouse gas pollution, Oregon currently has no formal way to evaluate the climate implications of proposed energy developments. That would change under House Bill 3343, the legislation sponsored by Representative Ken Helm (House District 34), and its companion, Senate Bill 1007, sponsored by Michael Dembrow (Senate District 23). (Note also an amendment to the bill.)

Dubbed the “Oregon Climate Test,” the legislation would subject new fossil fuel infrastructure projects to a review that would calculate their full emissions profile and their impact on the global climate. Crucially, the bill would also require proposed projects to pass an economic viability test. This analysis would determine a) whether the projects would be viable in a post-Paris Accord world, where the United States is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, and b) whether project backers were peddling a promise of jobs unlikely to materialize. Projects that fail to demonstrate their likely viability in a carbon-constrained future would be denied permits.

The principle of a climate test is not unprecedented. As Peter Ericksen of Stockholm Environment Institute pointed out in a December 2016 Seattle Times op-ed, President Obama advanced the idea in his rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline proposal, and he deployed similar reasoning when he declared the Arctic off-limits to oil and gas drilling.

The thinking can fairly be applied to the Northwest as well. The region has recently found itself in the crosshairs of so many dirty energy proposals—coal export terminals, oil-by-rail facilities, and various fracked gas schemes—that, combined, would have the carbon footprint equivalent of more than five Keystone XLs. Given that reality, there’s a strong argument that Oregon decision-makers should have a much more complete view of the climate consequences of the projects they are weighing.

A hearing on the House bill is expected for Monday, April 10, at 3:00 PM, in Hearing Room D.  In the meantime, you can read up on the backers’ case for an Oregon climate test and check out their Facebook page, too.