The results are in…
Good on ya Jon Snyder. And to all the City Council candidates, we applaud your hard work. But when it comes to their environmental views, you couldn’t have picked last night’s primary winners as more opposite.
Nancy McLaughlin from District 3 won by a landslide, taking 56 percent of the vote. Famous for rejecting the Sustainability Action Plan and irrefutably denying climate change, McLaughlin had a fascinating interview with The Inlander, titled "The Skeptic," two months ago. Asked about our city promoting clean energy, she responded, “if we’re going to incentivize the market, let’s let the market drive and take us down the road. Less regulations, more incentives, more market driven. … I struggle a little bit with what’s happening with wind power. The government is subsidizing — hugely — for wind power. If there’s a market for that, shouldn’t we let the market take its course? … I don’t believe there’s a true consensus that we are living during at a time of environmental crisis. I like the talk on energy security. But where’s the talk on nuclear? Where’s the talk on the Bakken oil fields up in North Dakota?”
And we’re still waiting for that “global cooling” period to hit.
That indicates a tenuous relationship with reality. For us, neutrality is hard to maintain on the question of whether climate change is real or not--- that debate is so 2006.
Also, McLaughlin’s fundraising mainly stems from development sources, another Spokane conundrum.
Snyder, representing District 2, won the most votes versus incumbent Mike Allen. Barely. By 46 votes to be exact. Snyder---co-founder of Thin Air Community Radio and publisher of Out There Monthly, plus the essential Go Green Directory---has a balanced approach pushing forward the economic benefits of sustainability like lowering city fuel costs. (Full disclosure: We’re happy to be forever linked with Jon via the Blog Bible which he brought to Iran with him on a recent trip.) DTE mentioned yesterday to a friend that he’s a unique candidate for Spokane, “ because he knows where we're from and where we need to go.” That might sound like hazy, romantic praise but consider Snyder’s excellent introduction to the 2008, Go Green Directory, part of our influence to give readers a tour of Expo ’74 on Earth Day:
I also remember the seventies version of the green movement in Spokane. Expo 74 was the first “Ecological” World’s Fair—an environmentally themed event. My mom used to buy me carob chips at the crunchy granola food co-op on Sunset highway. There was a great underground newspaper called the Spokane Natural. Long before Riverpark Square, at the current site of the Wells Fargo building, there was a downtown hippie mall called 2nd City with store after store of locally made goods. My dad worked at Bovay Engineers which designed a number of solar power systems on commercial buildings around town.
And then it all faded away.
He continues, the biggest enemy now might be information overload. We need to be informed about what’s going on in our world, but when folks get so hammered by bad environmental news they can reach a point of oblivion. They just give up. They don’t feel their sustainability efforts will ever help anything anyways so they stop trying. The Go Green Directory is trying to build a modest bulwark against oblivion. We are standing on the shoulders of some great efforts that date back to the seventies and beyond.
So now comes the intense race leading up to the November 3rd general election.
Full results:
Council District 2
Steve Eugster 1,504 / 16.06%
Greg Ridgley 313 / 3.34%
Mike Allen 2,616 / 27.93%
Kristina Sabestinas 2,077 / 22.18%
David Elton 194 / 2.07%
Jon Snyder 2,662 / 28.42%
Council District 3
Nancy McLaughlin 4,871 / 56.07%
Victor D. Noder 259 / 2.98%
Karen Kearney 1,372 / 15.79%
Christopher P. Stevens 417 / 4.80%
Barbara Lampert 661 / 7.61%
John Waite 1,107 / 12.74%
(And how’s this for local politics: The amount for campaign spending of the candidates could be peanuts compared to opposition fundraising against Envision Spokane’s Community Bill of Rights most notably at least $35,000 from the National Association of Home Builders. At the Spokane Homebuilders Association site, they have protest photos incongruously located above their Built Green environmentally-friendly residential building program.)
