A Hoppin' Good Petition

We've seen a lot of Blue Whale action out in our channel of late. Unfortunately, we've also had Blue Whale bodies float ashore, apparently due to being hit by boats. Lots of Blue Whales + Lots of Boat traffic = Lots of heartbreak (and hard work for the Natural History Museum crews.)

The Center for Biological Diversity has issued a petition to the Federal Government to set speed limits for traffic out in the Santa Barbara Channel to help protect these amazing and endangered creatures.

“Whether the blue whales are being disoriented by military sonar, toxic algae or something else entirely, what is actually killing them is speeding ships,” said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The single most effective thing we can do to protect blue whales is to slow down large ships.”

Ship strikes are one of the leading causes of death of large whales worldwide. Research on the U.S.’s east coast has identified ship speed limits as the most effective method to reduce whale mortality.

The Center’s petition asks the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. agency in charge of enforcing the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, to set a speed limit of 10 nautical miles per hour in the Santa Barbara Channel for all vessels 65 feet or larger until the whales have left the channel. The Fisheries Service has proposed similar speed limits on the east coast to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Most large vessels plying the Santa Barbara Channel are heading to or from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Several thousand container ships transit the channel each year and are a major source of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Because vessel fuel consumption increases dramatically with speed, speed restrictions on large vessels will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. - Center for Biological Diversity

Love the petition. Love the Center's little "green" logo, too. We'll gladly "hop" on board this idea with a little email or call to the Honorable Lois Capps' office.

Could Solar Panels Be Coming

to Santa Barbara Costco?

Costco is expanding its solar power initiative at a number of their Southern California facilities with a combined rated output of 2.4 megawatts.

PermaCity is now installing the systems, manufactured by Schott Solar, at Costco’s La Habra, Westlake Village, Simi Valley and Culver City warehouses. At approximately 600 kW (DC) per location, the PV systems will be part of one of the largest privately owned, multi-site commercial PV systems in the U.S., according to PermaCity, and it continues to grow.

..Earlier this month, it was reported that REC Solar was installing 2.5 megawatts of photovoltaics on four of Costco’s warehouse locations - two in Hawaii, including the Big Island and Kauai, and two in California, including San Luis Obispo and possibly Santa Barbara. - Environmental Leader

We get comments

The Internet(s). Blogs. It's amazing. These wonderful ways that have opened up for communicating, furthering discussion and sharing ideas and people post things like this.

Typical empty headed paranoid liberal reptile doesn't have an original idea in it's head and can't stand it when someone else does? Uh...good luck with the blog reinvention, maybe someone will read it now? Your envy is only too obvious. snicker.

One would hope people would not be so emotionally stunted; acting and thinking like 13 year olds, in real life and cyberspace. But, with such a person residing in the White House, I guess it serves as some sort of role model for bullying and immature behaviour.

Thanks for stopping by. I guess.

Afraid of a little "Light Blue Line"

If you've been following the stories of those conservative turtles, tucking their heads into their shells when the facts and reality are presented to them, you know that there are some folks in town who are terrified of a little blue line.

The Light Blue Line is not a "pet project" of our City's Government, it is a project to remind us all in this community that we live in changing times; a reminder that we must learn to change our ways of living as our ways of living will be changing for us, whether we want to or not.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what _ the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost." - Newsday.com

So...what DO we protect here in Santa Barbara when the tide rises? Do the taxpayers bailout those developers out who build huge unaffordable timeshares in a zone that will be affected by the rise of the sea levels? Do insurance companies bailout those whose homes and business are affected by the rise? And how much is this really going to cost our local economy and those of us who live here. What is the cost of doing "nothing" and just hiding our heads in our shells.

We ALL will be affected and thusly we should ALL have discourse about it. That is what The Light Blue Line was all about. To start dialogue. To seek solutions. To deal with reality. However, there are those out there who run scared of public discourse; are terrified of the reality of changes in the world. There are some who are now crying "victim" by wanting a financial bailout for their "pet project" of destroying an informational project for the community.

A 1,000 foot long blue line painted on Santa Barbara streets apparently is just too terrifying for some folks. I can see these "Turtle-istas" trying to ban people from knowing where earthquake faults run through our city, too.

OK...OK...

The Conservative Turtle has gotten my goat. Make room in the pond for more opinions.