Baby gets bad welcome gift

The most important regional environmental news of the past week was the arrival of a new Orca baby in Puget Sound, K-44 (http://goo.gl/9S9xs). Welcome baby boy!

However, the good news is balanced by an item from the previous week, concerning the results of last month's tabletop oil spill response drill:

"The drill showed procedures introducing oil dispersants on a spill need improving." (http://goo.gl/Yw1mg)

We ought to be alarmed state and federal authorities are talking about dispersants at all. First, as we now know from the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, dispersants don't remove the oil, they only make the oil invisible. Second, dispersants kill phytoplankton and bacteria in the food chain.

And third: DISPERSANTS ARE ILLEGAL in Puget Sound (http://goo.gl/G6GMP).

Republican debaters mention the environment

In case any doubts remain, here is the only explicit mention of the environment (that I heard) in tonight's debate among Republican candidates for president:

"What we need is the mother of all repeal bills," Bachmann said, promising to get rid of Obama's national health-care law and new regulations on the financial industry and to rename the Environmental Protection Agency the "Job Killing Agency of America." (http://goo.gl/o88td)

Rick Santorum inadvertently took an implicitly pro-environment position, in mentioning his opposition to ethanol subsidies. I guess ethanol must not work in lubricants.

The 6 Surrenders Of Vukan R. Vuchic

Something the pro-transit environmental movement has been advocating for decades is the idea of the intermodal transit system of trains and buses. Some of us would like to add Personal Rapid Transit to that short list.

Such a system, if pervasive enough, would allow people to travel around cities without driving. And if deployed in conjunction with thoughtful land use planning, redevelopment, and urban growth boundaries, the transit system could assist in correcting decades of sprawl made possible by, and in service of, the automobile -- or as I call it, the Private Travel Appliance.

New NMFS contact policy on orcas compromises good science

The good news is that boaters will now be required to stay at least 200 yards distant from Puget Sound orca whales, under new rules issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

However, NMFS decided to not make the waters west of San Juan Island a no-go area in summer time, bowing to local objections including marine dependent businesses. In other words, not having a no-go was based on commerce, not science.

Fate of Masdar PRT Not Yet Final

©MMXI Get On Board PRT!NewsCenter

We knew it was coming. Last October the news broke that the Masdar City project -- already retreating from ambitious goals of zero-carbon, zero-waste and producing all energy onsite -- had decided against installing Personal Rapid Transit throughout the 2.3 square mile 'eco-city.' The news came just as the inauguration of the pilot section of the PRT system, 'Phase IA,' was imminent.

And so we were not surprised when the wave of news items arrived. Environmental journalists attending January's World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi on the one hand wrote in giddy prose of riding the driverless pods, while on the other hand chuckling at the brevity of the 2-station route. It sounds so small when you say the stations are "a mere 800m" apart. That's half a mile to Americans.