Vancouver BC OKs 4 backyard hens, no roosters/ducks/turkeys -- and no charge

Image by Chris Breikss via Flickr

Salem officials would think they had died and gone to heaven if Salem was considered anywhere near as desirable as Vancouver, B.C.

So it's worth noting that this world-class cosmopolitan city has legalized four backyard hens for residents, at no charge.

A maximum of four hens, which should at least be four months old, are permitted per coop. Other poultry — roosters, ducks, turkeys or pheasants — remain banned, and the hens will not allowed in front yards or highrise apartment balconies.

Under the guidelines, the backyard enclosure must be roofed and cannot exceed nine square metres in area and three metres in height.

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• Vancouver legalizes more chicken coops (cbc.ca)

Reminder

Now that the primary is over, raise your voice for working families

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Got this in the mail today:

Imagine a political party that works its butt off to elect progressive Democrats—and the day after the election, works just as hard to hold them accountable to stand for progressive values.

That's exactly what the Oregon Working Families Party is. And it's why, as a fellow Oregonian, I'm writing to ask you to help support the WFP today—not with money, but by changing your voter registration to the Working Families Party.

3,000 people have already joined up. But the Oregon WFP needs to get to 10,000 members by August 4th to earn permanent ballot status. That'll allow the WFP to continue to represent the voice of working folks in Oregon and make sure Democrats know they need to stand with progressives to win elections this fall—goals that align so closely with those of many MoveOn members, including me.

Can you change your voter registration to be with the Oregon Working Families Party today? With online voter registration, it only takes a minute. Just click below to get started.

http://oregonwfp.org/register/moveon

The WFP, which is rapidly gaining steam in Oregon, is a close ally of MoveOn in other states, where we've worked together to elect progressives and fight for health care reform.

Don't worry—this is no pie-in-the-sky "spoiler" party. Here's how it works: Working Families Party members interview candidates and grill them on the hard questions. Then WFP endorses the candidates who commit to fighting for our progressive values.

On your election ballot, Democrats who have earned the WFP nomination are listed with both parties—Democratic and Working Families—next to their names. It's the WFP seal of approval to show voters which candidates are real champions for regular folks, not special interests. There's no spoiler effect, but voters get a new way to vote their progressive values—and candidates can see how important the progressive vote is on Election Day.

As The Oregonian put it, WFP's goal is to "influence state policy by uniting rural and urban voters around kitchen table economic issues that matter to working people."1 WFP has a great record of success in other states, electing progressive Democrats and winning on issues from green jobs to health care reform.2

Oregon just recently started online voter registration, so now it's even easier to switch your voter registration to the Working Families Party. It only takes a few minutes, and you can still, of course, vote for any candidate you want in the upcoming general election this November.

Help build the progressive party: change your official voter registration to be with the Oregon Working Families Party today:

http://oregonwfp.org/register/moveon

Thanks!

Here's their issues page. Works for me.

The Working Families Party fights to improve the lives of working people and their families by focusing our government on things that make our jobs better, provide security for our families and prosperity for our communities. That includes:

• Affordable healthcare for all Oregonians where our health, or lack thereof, is not dependent on individual wealth and subject to private profiteering; we support national single-payer health care consistent with the principles of H.R. 676.

• Opening doors to opportunity through higher education and technical training that does not result in indebtedness for our citizens.

• Affordable housing, a stop to predatory lending practices, investment in new affordable housing development, and protection of existing affordable housing.

• Promotion of green family wage jobs whose legacy leaves a clean, secure, and sustainable environment for our children.

• Supporting fair trade, defending our jobs against outsourcing, wage and benefit cuts, and corporate raiding.

• The right to organize and reach a first contract free of intimidation, discrimination, and illegal terminations.

Click here to read the full 2008 platform of the Oregon Working Families Party.

To promote these values, the Oregon Working Families Party is currently working on two critical issue campaigns:

A Public Bank for Oregon. The OWFP is working with a broad coalition of organizations to promote the creation of a State Bank of Oregon, modeled after the 90-year-old Bank of North Dakota, which would use money that belongs to the state to invest in job creation, education, and homeownership here in Oregon, rather than giving that money over to big banks to continue to line their pockets. Click here to read more, and to sign our petition encouraging legislators to support this commonsense proposal.

Disability Insurance for all Oregonians. Many of Oregon’s working families live with the knowledge that on any day they could get injured or sick and find themselves unable to work. The OWFP is working on a proposal to create a statewide disability insurance program, modeled after California’s highly successful “SDI” program, which covers all workers in the state.

If you've got the sun, you'd be crazy not to jump on this

Image by Serge Melki via Flickr

They're handing out free money for making your home or business pollute less while giving you a way to generate energy for yourself even during power blackouts on the grid -- what's not to like? If you are a residential customer with good southern exposure or a business, church, or nonprofit with a big roof, you're crazy not to investigate this.

Can cities like Salem afford to ignore the warnings that businesses are getting?

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Interesting paper here:

Reports and Papers

Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business

Chatham House-Lloyd's 360 Risk Insight White Paper
Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn, June 2010

Download Paper here

• Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper - failure to do so could be catastrophic
  
  
• Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
  
  
• China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
  
  
• We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
  
  
• Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
  
  
• Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
  
  
• To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
  
  
• Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of 'just-in-time' models
  
  
• Investment in renewable energy and 'intelligent' infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

Read expert comment by Antony Froggatt >>

Watch video >>

As goes Maine, so too should go Oregon (and the country)

It's even easier when you pass laws making those who choose the materials for the products take responsibility for those choices by making them accept the products back at the end of their useful lives. Image by chrissatchwell via Flickr

Maine's extended producer responsibility law -- huzzah!

Peak oil to lead to Predatory (Oil-Seeking) Militarism?

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A friend sent this link on and added this comment:

When your country's upper crust social "scientists" cannot face truth, facts, and consequences, what hope is there for timely adaptations? And what use are they, or perhaps more to the point, how much damage can they contribute to the cause? I guess it's not just economists who are problems, but all the rest of that lot as well. Are we about to regret the day when someone began to take them seriously and even include them in college curricula?

Aside from those dinosauristic ponderings, it's interesting to get the author's take on the effects of culture and political system on eventual outcomes. What she says makes general good sense to me, and bodes ill for many parts of the U.S. I don't see the northeast coping any better than the southeast at having their backbone ripped out - and the entire eastern seaboard is massively overpopulated.
tooj

EPIC FAIL -- corporate criminal edition

CONTEST: Best climate ideas for Salem's next mayor

OK, now that slightly more than a third of us bothered to pick who would run unopposed for the mayor's seat in November, the real work can begin: Helping her understand the opportunities and challenges Salem is going to face as a result of the massive "let's wing it and see what happens" experiment we're running to determine what happens when you pump aeons of fossil-fuel carbon emissions into the atmosphere in a century or so.

To do so, I thought I'd try something new: a LOVESalem reader contest.

That is, to help get more people thinking about how Salem can either help prevent, prepare for, or respond to the global climate destabilization experiment we're running, LOVESalem is giving away three hardbound copies* of the excellent book "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery to the three people who submit the most interesting, creative, and useful ideas (in my opinion) for how Salem can help prevent, prepare for, or respond to the consequences of this experiment.

To enter, put your idea(s) into a comment below. Enter as many times as you like, be as creative as you can, and anticipate objections where possible (while remaining reasonably concise). Feel free to build on the ideas of others (so long as you add something significant to them).

When it seems that the brainstorming has tapered off, I'll try to consolidate all the ideas and pick three winners. If you want the book, put an email in with your suggestions or otherwise let me know how to contact you so I can get you the book if one of your ideas lands among the three best.

[*Fine Print: Potentially this will only prove that nobody reads LOVESalem; if so, or if the ideas are all recycled or if I just can't find three that grab me as exciting, then I'll do something else with the books. In other words, while I hope to give away these three books in return for some great ideas, the books aren't guaranteed to be given away at all. Oh, and since everybody's carbon emissions are the problem, you don't have to live in Salem or even Oregon to win -- you do have to live in the US, though, because the price of mailing books internationally has gotten way out of hand. But if you're outside the US and you have a great idea for what Salem should do, feel free to speak up, as this is a problem that hurts everybody, everywhere.]

WORD: Higher Ed's Big Lie

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This is the most important unrecognized development out there -- that in an era where resource limits are the constraints (rather than human capital), increasing the amount of education that the idle cannot apply simply diverts resources from productive use to helping people mark time before being unemployed or underemployed. Helping to strap those people to huge amounts of debt at the same time is not just immoral but also exceedingly unwise.

We're starting to experience the national equivalent of PTSD as young people experience the Higher Ed myth unraveling in their own lives. Supposedly educated, they know that they lack any meaningful skills that anyone needs. They cannot make or maintain any of the goods that they use every day, nearly all of them do not have the slightest idea about how to grow or prepare the food they consume, the clothes they wear, or the shelter they inhabit; yet they are marked like Cain with a flaming scar, the number of dollars they owe for this "education" that has left them entirely at the mercy of others for their survival.

The elite mandarins and pundits are all talking about how we need to raise the age of retirement and get ordinary folks to scale back their expectations of what people can do for themselves collectively (i.e., through government). The reality is that if we continue with the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama globalization ideal -- this weird experiment in destroying the middle class and moving to a third-world economic model of a hyper-rich elite presiding over a shattered middle that is constantly being told that they have no alternative but to accept an impoverished future of debt and insecurity -- we are stacking all the kindling we need right next to the gas cans.

UPDATE: The antidote.