Monday Mailing 051319

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 34 13 May 2019 1.

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Jordan Cove Would Be Oregon’s Top Carbon Polluter If Built (Michael Hoch) In “Vicious Cycle,” Snowmelt Fuels Wildfires And Wildfires Melt Snow Key State Certification Denied For SW Oregon Natural Gas Export Project (Michael Hoch) Oregon Court To Damascus: You’re A City Whether You Like It Or Not (Michael Walker) Native Renewables: Powering Up Tribal Communities (Michael Hoch) How Did We Get Used To Out-Of-Scale Cities?

The Rise Of Fear-Based Social Media Like Nextdoor, Citizen, And Now Amazon’s Neighbors What Will It Take To Finish This Bike Trail Across The U.S.?

Fresh Mountain Smog? 96% Of National Parks Have Hazardous Air Quality RESOURCE: Creative Ways To Solicit Stakeholder Feedback

1. Jordan Cove Would Be Oregon’s Top Carbon Polluter If

Built

The state of Oregon has some greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals in place for the next 30 years. Despite this, state emissions are higher than where they should be in order to start meeting the goals.

Quote of the Week:

“My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.”

- Michael Jordan

Oregon Fast Fact #9

At 8,000 feet deep Hells Canyon is the deepest river gorge in North America.

The Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export terminal and pipeline project proposed for southwest Oregon would not help. If the project gets approved and built, it is projected to become the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the state.

What’s the carbon emissions situation for Jordan Cove?

Total annual expected greenhouse gas emissions in the project footprint are calculated as part of the federal environmental review that happens with projects like Jordan Cove. For Jordan Cove, those emissions amount to 2.14 million metric tons per year in Oregon.

Portland General Electric’s Boardman Power Plant — the only coalfired power plant in Oregon — emits 1.7 million tons of carbon a year. That’s nearly half a million tons less than Jordan Cove is projected to produce.

How does a pipeline and export terminal produce carbon dioxide?

The main way is the “L” aspect of the LNG — liquefying the natural gas. Sending gas across the Pacific Ocean to Asia doesn’t make economic sense, so Jordan Cove plans to liquefy the natural gas Page 1 of 6

before loading it onto ships. You can fit about 600 times more natural gas on a tanker as a liquid than as a gas.

To access the full story, click here.

2. In “Vicious Cycle,” Snowmelt Fuels Wildfires And Wildfires Melt Snow With spring in full bloom, winter’s last stores of snow are beginning to melt. As they do, they’ll release much-needed fresh water into streams or the surrounding soil, fueling plant growth and replenishing drinking resources for communities.

It’s one of nature’s most important annual rituals.

But how soon the snow starts to liquefy, and how quickly it disappears, may depend on more than just the outside temperature. Scientists are finding that wildfires in the western United States may alter the landscape in ways that lead to earlier, faster snowmelt.

That’s a big concern for Western water resources. If the snowpack melts and runs off too quickly, it could cause regional freshwater resources to dry up before the cooler fall temperatures set in, increasing the probability of drought.

But there’s another concern, as well. Many researchers believe a faster snowmelt and a drier summer landscape may also worsen the fire season in some areas, leading to bigger, hotter blazes.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Key State Certification Denied For SW Oregon Natural Gas Export Project

Oregon environmental regulators delivered a blow Monday to a controversial energy export proposal on Oregon’s south coast, saying the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas pipeline and terminal project falls short of meeting clean water standards.

The state Department of Environmental Quality announced in a press release its decision that Jordan Cove doesn’t meet standards required under the 401 Water Quality Certification program, which regulates the extent to which projects like this can pollute or otherwise degrade waterways.

For Jordan Cove, this would include impacts to rivers and streams from pipeline crossings, dredging, filling in wetlands and stormwater runoff.

DEQ, which is in charge of enforcing Clean Water Act standards in Oregon, says Jordan Cove still will have the option to reapply for the certification, submitting “additional information that could result in a different decision.”

To access the full story, click here.

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4. Oregon Court To Damascus: You’re A City Whether You Like It Or Not Oregon’s most reluctant city is back -- despite years of desperately trying to disband.

The Oregon Court of Appeals released an opinion Wednesday three years after Damascus disincorporated to say that no, it actually hasn’t.

The court found that a state law crafted specifically to let the Clackamas County city put itself out of its misery didn’t do that at all.

While Damascas apparently never legally ceased to exist, practically speaking, it did, jettisoning its city employees, turning over its assets to the county and letting City Council terms expire.

Now the tiny patch of rolling farmland will have to build itself back into a city from the ground up at the order of the court – likely the first time in the state’s history this has happened.

Which leaves the once-again-a-city, the county and the state with more questions than answers.

This isn’t only unprecedented -- this is Damascus. The complicated matter of restarting a city is nearly impossible to imagine because of the history of the city.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Native Renewables: Powering Up Tribal Communities

There’s something amiss in the Southwest. The region has the best solar potential in the country, yet thousands still live in homes without electricity. The problem is especially acute in native communities like the Navajo Nation, which was passed over in earlier efforts to bring electricity to rural communities.

Suzanne Singer and Wahleah Johns saw this problem as an opportunity. In 2016 they started the organization Native Renewables to help bring power to homes on the Hopi reservation and the Navajo Nation. The project also works to train a local workforce to build, maintain and manage renewable energy systems.

We spoke with Singer, a mechanical engineer and a member of the Navajo tribe, about the promises and hurdles of expanding renewable energy access in native communities.

What made you decide to use your engineering skills to expand renewable energy capabilities for Native American communities?

I started thinking about it when I was a graduate student intern for the Tribal Energy Program at Sandia National Labs. Learning about the amazing things other engineers and other tribes were doing planted a seed in my mind that I could use my capabilities to potentially improve the lives of native people.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. How Did We Get Used To Out-Of-Scale Cities?

People tend to have a narrow scale of spatial comfort. We regularly adjust our surroundings to arrive at a setting we feel comfortable in. We make small rooms feel larger with windows, mirrors, and by keeping them uncluttered. We make large rooms more inviting by arranging furniture to create multiple small rooms. Think hotel lobbies, or the way restaurants arrange tables.

All of these design techniques involve what’s called the “human scale”—creating spaces that are the right size and layout for a person to feel comfortable. The human scale also has important economic impacts that we’ll touch on in a bit.

When good architects design buildings, they use people as the foundational size metric. The size of most office buildings has a strong correlation with how many people the architect designs the building to accommodate. The same principle applies to homes, stores, schools, restaurants, and other structures. Admittedly, this varies a bit depending on wealth, but for the most part we see this pattern everywhere. It’s a pattern we expect to find in the places we inhabit.

However, as this post will explore, much of our modern public realm is far out of proportion to the human scale.

To access the full story, click here.

7. The Rise Of Fear-Based Social Media Like Nextdoor, Citizen And Now Amazon’s Neighbors

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

Nextdoor bills itself as the “world’s largest social network for the neighborhood,” where you can ask for nearby restaurant recommendations, buy used furniture, or report a stolen bike. In practice, its “crime and safety” section has been a hotbed for racial stereotyping that’s forced the company to rewrite its software and policies.

Citizen — whose previous form was called Vigilante and which appeared to encourage users to stop crimes in action — sends users 9-1-1 alerts for crimes happening nearby. It also allows users to livestream footage they record of the crime scene, “chat with other Citizen users as situations develop” and “build out your Inner Circle of family and friends to create your own personal safety network, and receive alerts whenever they’re close to danger.”

To access the full story, click here.

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8. What Will It Take To Finish This Bike Trail Across The U.S.?

If you’re an avid American cyclist, odds are you’ve harbored this dream: a sea-to-shining-sea cross-country bike trek, the sort of epic journey Jerry Cowden took from Arlington, Virginia, all the way to Astoria, Oregon, when he retired from his job at the FCC in 2009.

“I went out my back door, got on my bike, and didn’t stop until I got to the Pacific Ocean, 106 days later,” he says.

Cowden’s path west traced the TransAmerica Trail, a set of cross-country routes on backroads originally mapped for the 1976 Bikecentennial ride, and the Katy Trail, a recreational rail-trail in Missouri. That helped him minimize his encounters with motor vehicle traffic. But he says he did have to deal with a few sections of roadway he had to share with motorists. “They tried as much as possible to route you on roads that are low stress and low traffic, but sometimes, it’s unavoidable.”

If you’re in a car, you’ve been able to motor across the United States since 1913. (Thanks, Lincoln Highway.) But on a bike, it’s been more of a challenge—there’s no single unified route made for cycles that spans the continent. That may soon change: On Wednesday, the Rails-toTrails Conservancy gave the grand reveal for an entirely car-free way to get across the country— the Great American Rail-Trail—that would connect Washington, D.C., to Seattle. The path runs through 12 states: Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Fresh Mountain Smog? 96% Of National Parks Have Hazardous Air Quality Millions of tourists will head out into America’s national parks this summer in search of fresh mountain air. But according to a new report they should instead expect dangerous levels of pollution; roughly 96% of the nation’s parks are struggling with significant air quality issues.

The report, released yesterday by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), found that some of the most popular parks, including Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Joshua Tree national parks and Mojave national preserve, were among the worst offenders. Last year, these parks recorded up to two months where ozone levels were considered dangerous –mostly in summer when visitation is at its highest.

In 88% of parks, the NPCA found that the elevated levels of air pollution were a direct threat to sensitive species. Air pollution is also exacerbating climate change, adding to a mounting list of threats to national parks that includes wildfire, drought and unnatural seasons.

“We are not doing right by the places that we most cherish,” said Stephanie Kodish, the Clean Air program director for the NPCA. “By protecting these places we are protecting each other, our communities and we are protecting the planet,” she says, emphasizing that the actions that need to be taken to safeguard the parks are the same needed to combat climate change and defend public health.

To access the full story, click here.

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10. RESOURCE: Creative Ways To Solicit Stakeholder Feedback Survey fatigue was getting the best of our clients Many mission-driven organizations get buried under a seemingly bottomless pile of surveys.

Different funders and stakeholders each commonly require separate surveys, leading to widespread survey fatigue for participants and staff. And get this: that’s not the only problem.

Survey results rarely tell the whole story, and they leave few opportunities for clients to provide practical suggestions on how services may further improve and yield meaningful results.

Creative Ways helps you dig deeper while keeping stakeholders engaged We collected our favorite non-traditional ways to solicit input from stakeholders, like selfie stations, candy surveys, and collages, and put them into one place. These approaches allow for more substantive back-and-forth between you and your stakeholders, and are designed for settings where traditional approaches aren't the right fit.

Creative Ways provides step-by-step guidance on 15 different approaches, organized into three sections: visual, kinesthetic, and verbal. Based on our prior publication that was focused more on youth audiences, Creative Ways offers hands-on input strategies that work for folks of any age.

To access the resource, click here.

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