The Polar Pioneer Arrived in Seattle Yesterday, and The Stranger Was in the Water with It: Check out what @sydbrownstone and @heidigroover saw when they jumped in a kayak and went out on Elliott Bay with the kayaktivists and Duwamish tribal members saying "ShellNO." (And, of course, TV news people did the same but from a yacht.)
Former Mayor Mike McGinn Says Mayor Ed Murray Should Have Shouted About Shell Much Sooner: On this week's episode of the Blabbermouth podcast, former Seattle mayor Mike McGinn hones in on something current mayor Ed Murray said last week on the podcast. Last week, Mayor Murray said he'd been told privately back in November that Shell's Arctic drilling rigs were headed for Seattle. But he didn't say anything publicly about it until this year. "The best way to have stopped Shell would have been sunshine," McGinn says on this week's Blabbermouth. "If Shell's actions had been known well in advance, in time for the activists to bring the pressure on the port and be heard, this would have been stopped. And it turns out that the port commissioners were keeping it a secret. It turns out Ed Murray was keeping it a secret, too."
McGinn Also Tangles with the Seattle Times' Danny Westneat over Whether Kayaktivism Will Accomplish Anything: Yesterday, Danny Westneat wrote that feel-good, photogenic kayaktivism "won’t do anything substantive about climate change." On Blabbermouth, McGinn and I discuss Westneat's critique, with the former mayor saying, in part, that the protest is about removing "the social license for fossil-fuel companies to operate" and establishing a "different vision for our future"—a vision that people and politicians will then be forced to act on.
The University of Washington Divests from Thermal Coal: Sydney Brownstone reports: "After three years of pressure from a small group of dedicated students, the UW's Board of Regents voted unanimously on Thursday to divest the school from thermal coal—the stuff largely used to produce electricity. In doing so, the school became the largest university to remove coal investments from its endowment portfolio, some $2.3 million (as of 2014) out of $2.8 billion. It wasn't a straightforward path, explains one of the group's organizers, UW senior Sarra Tekola. At first, the university advised the group of students to do shareholder advocacy, as in, writing multiple letters to energy companies in the hopes that those companies would shift to renewable power generation. The group's primary concern, said Tekola, was coal's immediate impacts on human life, specifically the estimated 13,200 premature deaths caused by pollution from coal-fired power plants a year (this according to the Clean Air Task Force). But shareholder advocacy didn't work. Now that more direct pressure has worked, Divest UW plans to keep putting pressure on the university until it has fully divested from fossil fuels."
"More Protests Planned." As the Seattle Times reports: "Peter McGraw, a spokesman for the Port, said that Seattle officers and Port police would 'continue to work together to ensure that demonstrators exercise their First Amendment rights peacefully, safely and legally in areas adjacent to our terminals.'"
Seattle No Longer Among the Top 10 Most Bikable Cities: "Friday is National Bike to Work Day, and I wish I had better news to report," writes Gene Balk. "Seattle is no longer among the 10 most bikeable big cities in the U.S., according to rankings for 2015 released by Walk Score on Thursday."
Don't Forget: The Polar Pioneer Is the SECOND Giant Drilling Machine to Need Servicing Downtown: With this in mind, Sightline asks Shell: "Haven't you heard that this is where colossal drills come to die?"
And B.B. King Is Dead at 89: "The blues guitar institution B.B. King died yesterday in Las Vegas at the age of 89," writes The Stranger's Sean Nelson. "Born Riley B. King to a family of sharecroppers in Itta Bena, Mississippi in 1925, the great-grandson of slaves, he would go on to wealth and glory, becoming effectively synonymous with his chosen instrument and idiom."
