Public Power - September/October 2007 - (Page 13)

8 couple years ago. I said to my City Council, “Why don’t you guys pass a bill to do the same thing here?” There is no silver bullet to solve the problem of global warming. There are a thousand things that have to be done, among which are alternative energy and renewables. We have more sunshine in Seattle that they do in Germany and Germany leads the world in solar energy. I want to have the financing mechanisms out there for creative localities that have figured it out. San Francisco’s done it. Sacramento’s now doing it and Los Angeles. My view is that California’s miles ahead of the rest of the country. I want everybody to have the opportunity to finance these kinds of program. 9 to be unwilling to look at the possibilities. You can move grain on trains and you can do a lot of things on transportation. You don’t need the river dammed. You don’t need the river barges and all that stuff, necessarily. That may be the best way to do it and there may be another way to save the salmon, but none of the ways they’ve tried so far have worked. These people are just condemning the salmon to a slow death and one day there won’t be any fish. 10 The viability of salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest is an important issue for you. In March you introduced legislation calling for a one-year study by the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office on options for restoring wild salmon runs in a “fiscally responsible way.” This is a very challenging issue in the electricity-intensive Northwest, where hydroelectric power is abundant. What solutions would you like to see implemented to address the problem? We haven’t done a study on this for almost 10 years. I have been dropping in this bill for the last four sessions of Congress. In earlier sessions, my bill had a provision that would authorize the breaching of dams if the study indicated that needed to be done. This time, in order to get the study done, I took out the provision to authorize breeching the dams. But transportation interests and farm interests and [others] have resisted this mightily, arguing that the little bit of energy produced at the Snake River Dams is so important that we can’t even consider such a thing. I think we are going to lose a number of species of salmon and we’ll all be eating out of fish farms, if we are not careful. I think it would be a tragic loss to the state because we have allowed people How does that reconcile with the need for electricity? Obviously, there are other ways to get electricity. The dams were put up with the impression that they wouldn’t cause any problems. Well, it does cause a problem. One of the things that people are not talking about now, but will be some day soon is the fact that those reservoirs behind the dams are one of the major sources of methane gas because of the rotting plant material in the bottom of those. That methane gas is coming up out of the water and going into the atmosphere. It’s one of the biggest greenhouse gases and it’s a big problem. But it’s not being talked about because nobody knows what to do about it. That’s a problem. The dams were sold as a clean form of energy, which they are; and as renewables, which they are. But there are down sides to dams. There’s fishing on the Columbia River, tourism—let’s look at the economics of this. What is the tradeoff? We now have PUDs out in eastern Washington that are going to start putting in solar paneling. . . . It may be that the electricity from dams won’t be needed. The biggest source of energy is in conservation— and it’s the quickest to get. Americans have had an awful habit of showing off our riches in how we waste. We waste water. We waste energy. We waste food. We have not been pressed. My feeling is that efficiency is the major thing we should be talking about. A number of people are pushing hard now to build new nuclear plants, including in the Northwest. Do you support the expansion of the nation’s nuclear reactor fleet? No. I led the initiative back in 1980 “Don’t Waste Washington.” That was my initiative. I really think that until people solve the question of where we’re going to put the waste and how we’re going to deal with it, opening up new nuclear plants is bad. This is a huge problem. I am very worried about Washington agriculture. We’re picking up evidence of small amounts [of radiation] in the fish. God knows the trouble we’re going to have in the state of Washington if somehow our food production is damaged. You might remember the problem a few years ago around Alar. Apple sales in the state of Washington went down about 40 percent overnight. The potential for this stuff down the road of getting something contaminated –you see what’s going on with the Chinese right now. The state of Washington is an agricultural state. The number one business is agriculture, outside of Boeing airplanes. Two-thirds of the state is farming. All we have to do is get some black mark. We don’t need food that is contaminated because we refuse to deal with nuclear waste. Hanford was created in the days when they thought that you could put it out in the dessert—no one will notice. It’s dry and it’s far away from people. Now we’ve got the biggest junkyard in the world. We have not cleaned it up and we spend millions and millions of dollars every year working on the Hanford cleanup. It’s been going on at a snail’s pace. I’m not willing to bring the state another problem. I was in the Legislature in the days of WPPSS [Washington Public Power Supply System]. A lot of people walking around now want to forget about WPPSS. But they guys who advocated nuclear power said it would be such cheap power that they wouldn’t even have to put a meter on it. The smoke they tried to blow at us was unbelievable. s SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 13 www.APPAnet.org http://www.APPAnet.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - September/October 2007

Contents Washington Focus 10 Questions Public Power (Every) Week Training Tomorrow’s Work Force What’s in Your Wallet? U.S. Lags in Broadband Deployment Now What? For Engineers Safety Community Broadband For Governing Boards Human Resources Hometown Connections Customer Service DEED Index to Advertisers Advertisers by Category Parting Shot

Public Power - September/October 2007

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