Chuck Areford (EW 1/5) claims I’m grumpy because I don’t like environmental groups being sleepy on the job.

No group opposes expansions of Eugene to Junction City and toward Veneta.

No group opposes the planned widening of Beltline highway from 10 to 16 lanes at the Willamette River.  Last March, ODOT and Federal Highway Administration approved this and kept their decision from public view — until I filed a public records request. Fortunately, the third of a billion dollars for construction does not exist (yet?).

In February 2020, Beyond Toxics, Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands and 10 other groups signed the “Private Forest Accord” with Weyerhaeuser, Roseburg and other timber barons to permit continued aerial spraying and clearcutting on corporate timberlands. Oregon Wild’s rural employee quit in disgust. A member of Cascadia Wildlands told me she was outraged that their deal “criminalized activism against spraying and allows presumptive damages with no limits against someone the industry teams ‘interfering’ with their ‘operation.’ We also gave them a raft of shit for their sellout bullshit.”

EWEB misinforms when they claim 90 percent of our electricity is renewable. EWEB is part of the western power grid — “Western Electricity Coordinating Council” — which runs from B.C. to Tijuana to Denver. Natural gas is WECC’s largest energy source and has increased more than renewables.

A lesson of climate change and peak everything is we are all interconnected.

When I learned to use solar electric panels in 1990 the first lesson was “reduce consumption.” PeakChoice.org and SustainEugene.org have details.

Mark Robinowitz

Eugene

Editor’s Note: Mark Robinowitz’s websites espouse such theories as the idea that U.S. elections are “rigged”and that 9/11 was “deliberately allowed to happen.”

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