Once upon a time, Bart Mihailovich and I took a history class at Eastern Washington University taught by Dr. Bill Youngs. The shared learning of Andrew Carnegie and the Industrial Revolution led to a confused afternoon in Riverfront Park some five years later and some fifteen hours or so before we were to lead people through the park on a historical tour of Expo‘74 and what it meant for the environment. It served us well to accidentally and happily both be in the same History class at EWU. Just as it served us well to coincidentally bump into Dr. Youngs one afternoon in the park as we were preparing on how we’d give our Expo ‘74 tours that we had agreed to as part of Earth Day Spokane 2009.  The book we were using to prepare for the tour was The Fair and The Falls: Spokane’s Expo ‘74, Transforming an American Environment, written by none other than Dr. Youngs.

This book is quite the undertaking. Youngs and his research staff - which included Luptio Flores, station manager at KYRS - interviewed over 200 citizens and reviewed thousands of pages of records, in order to write the definitive history of Spokane, its people, and the first-ever Environmental World’s Fair to be ratified by the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris. They even wore T-Shirts that told people to call a number to share their memory of Expo '74.

And, with King Cole's recent passing, it seemed appropriate to have Dr. Youngs on the DTE radio show to share some memories. It's a good 45-minute interview  that you can hear this morning at 7 a.m. on KYRS Thin Air Community Radio (89,9 FM, 92.3 FM) or in the upper right corner of this blog for the podcasts or at KYRS.

Death Of A Climate Bill. “We believe we have compromised significantly, but we’re prepared to compromise further.” So said Sen. John Kerry during the protracted death of climate change legislation. Grist has an awesome, exclusive new comic about the sordid tale you can read HERE.

Those were the days. It's funny to think back how excited politicians were for clean energy investments four years ago - it was new, innovative and the political fallout had yet to occur. An article in Crosscut serves as a reminder that, hey, we're still working on set mandates, reporting Washington's voters declared in 2006 that 15 percent of the state's electricity must come from alternative sources — wind, solar, biomass and others — by 2020.

The interim targets are 3 percent by Jan. 1, 2012, and 9 percent by 2016. So how will anyone know whether those targets are met? And what will happen if they are not? With the first deadline just over a year away, Washington officials have begun scratching their heads about how to answer those questions. Full story HERE.

Donation Drives New Direction of Bioenergy Research at University of Idaho. A $25,000 donation from Texas entrepreneur Randy Hill and his company, APT Advanced Trailer and Equipment LP, to the University of Idaho has funded research focused on converting woody biomass to energy. The gift has allowed the university to install a pilot-scale pyrolysis unit at its steam plant. Pyrolysis is a type of incineration that uses almost no oxygen. When applied to an organic material like wood, pyrolysis yields biofuel plus a small amount of charcoal. Armando McDonald, professor of wood chemistry and wood composites, researches pyrolysis of woody biomass to create bio-oil. “This involves thermally cracking the wood to break it down into smaller molecules,” said McDonald. “The process yields about 60 percent bio-oil; 20 percent syngas, a gas mixture  that is then used to fuel the operation; and about 20 percent char that can be used as a soil amendment.” Full story HERE.

 

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