“Put that in your pipe and smoke it” rings true in these fossil fuel End Times. We are still building pipelines full of natural gas which winds up polluting the air. The pipes flow through pristine wilderness that would save us from ourselves were they not permanently compromised by the mass of powerlines, pipelines and turbines overwhelming the fragile environment. The latest assault on wild lands is the Ruby Pipeline project that crosses wilderness in Nevada and four other Western states. Last Friday The Center for Biological diversity filed a lawsuit in U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service .
These are dark days for enlightened self-interest, the kind that thinks long term and values sustainability. Instead of nuturing innovation Business devotes its limitless resources to exploiting America’s anti-intellectual constituency. Case in point: Lobbyists from a broad array of business groups are planning to pour money into a targeted list of legislative races this fall. Even as we speak, monied interests are meeting to strategize around ways to reduce the size of the big Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. Meanwhile, the state’s paper of record describes the operation’s goal as an attempt to “empower moderate legislators more sympathetic to business interests.” Tea and Sympathy indeed.
“First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,”. And we’re still fighting the ‘Power’ Elite. Yesterday PacifiCorp announced plans for a joint power line project with Portland General Electric, jointly constructing and owning the 210-mile line. PGE has natural gas and coal-fired power plants in Boardman, just west of Hermiston and the Umatilla Army Depot. It has proposed a new natural gas plant there, and could ultimately build a third if it closes its Boardman coal plant to meet haze-reduction rules or avoid carbon taxes. The company owns a wind farm in Sherman County and has received multiple requests from new wind farm operators to connect to the Cascade Crossing line. It comes down to this: the less power we use, the less power they have.
- KBOO