#Pacific Northwest industry

[kian-charles-gray-photography]

The Industrial Heart Amidst the Misty North Shore Mountains

The North Shore of Vancouver stands as a meeting ground of industrial progress and unspoiled natural beauty. This image, taken through the spectral lens of an infrared filter, brings out the dramatic dichotomy of this region. The Neptune Terminals, Vancouver’s principal bulk shipping hub, occupies the foreground, with towering cranes and cement silos lined up against the backdrop of the North…

[backwoodspriestess]

Southwest Oregon, a favorite old house of mine.

[xoverit]

Tacoma, Washington. (May 2021)

[eopederson]

Antique grape press, winery district, Woodinville, Washington, 2019.

The number of small wineries in the Woodinville area is quite amazing.

[davetada]

Industrial

Seattle, WA

[guavagyal]

fashion is cyclical 👒✨️

[spectrofilias]

playing with light in the pacific northwest

[eopederson2]

Log booms and port from Ediz Hook, Port Angeles, 1980.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[nitewrighter]

I feel like those "The entire skincare industry movement is a capitalist/social media grift/scam" posts really fail to take people's physical comfort with regard to their skin into account. Like everyone's skin varies depending on genetics, and not everyone is living in the same place where their skin got its traits. Like, if your skin developed over generations to protect you from an arid mediterranean environment but you're currently living in the pacific northwest, you might need a toner or something because your skin isn't cycling its oils the way it would in a drier clime and you don't like how greasy it feels. Sometimes acne is painful and it's not unreasonable to not want painful zits. If your skin feels uncomfortably tight all the time, you probably need a moisturizer, and incorporating that into your daily routine for your comfort doesn't make you a slave of capitalism. Like it is messed up that there's this massive industry around skincare and that that industry is built around fucked up eurocentric beauty standards, but also like... skin is a very individualistic thing, depending on your genetics and potential allergies and where you live, and like... idk, obviously no one needs a million products or a 47 minute routine, but the needs of skin vary and it's kind of dumb to make these big blanket statements about how the only thing you need is sunscreen. (I mean you do definitely need sunscreen though. 100%.)

[omgthatdress]

(Cowichan elder Dora Wilson)

Since it's definitely sweater season, I felt like doing a deep dive into a really unique and interesting bit of knitting history: the Cowichan sweater, sometimes also called the Canadian sweater.

Spinning and weaving among tribes in the Pacific Northwest is something that goes back to pre-colonial times, using wool from domestic dogs and wild mountain goats.

(photo of the now-extinct breed, the Salish Wool Dog)

The wool was then woven into stunningly warm garments and blankets, like the famous chilkat blanket.

(Chilkat Blanket, Saint Louis Art Museum)

With colonization brought the introduction of domestic sheep, which could be reliably herded and used for wool.

It's not entirely clear who introduced knitting to the Cowichan tribe, but it's clear by the early 20th century, an industry had grown up around selling hand-knit sweaters with traditional Native design motifs on them.

[dewitty1]

Horses hauling a spruce, Washington state, 1905, photo by Darius… https://ift.tt/2x6Fk0S

[xoverit]

Tacoma, Washington. (May 2021)

[vintagelasvegas]

7:30 AM, May 8, 1953 - Atomic blast and mushroom cloud 75 miles away, seen from Hotel Last Frontier, Las Vegas Strip.

The blast was at Nevada Test Site; the photo was a planned promotional effort by the Las Vegas News Bureau.

The News Bureau, the resort industry’s own PR team whose mission it was to get the name “Las Vegas” into the national media by any means possible, found the series of atomic tests in the 1950s to be a reliable success. An earlier photo by Bureau photographer Don English showing an atomic cloud rising in the distance over downtown Las Vegas skyline had been his biggest success to date with his photo published in LIFE and newspapers around the world.

English planned these photos for the May 8th test blast hoping for a similar success. He was perched on a balcony at Hotel Last Frontier facing northwest, overlooking the courtyard and pool. It was early-morning on a day that wasn’t particularly hot, with the swimmers possibly also positioned for the photo.

The covered wagons in the distance are the hotel's Last Frontier Village theme park. The screen of Motor-Vu Drive-In theater is beyond the hotel. A Union Pacific train passed in the distance of the second photo.

[eopederson]

Anaconda, Montana, 1969.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the Associated Press (AP):

The U.S. government on Tuesday acknowledged, for the first time, the harmful role it has played over the past century in building and operating dams in the Pacific Northwest — dams that devastated Native American tribes by inundating their villages and decimating salmon runs while bringing electricity, irrigation and jobs to nearby communities.

In a new report, the Biden administration said those cultural, spiritual and economic detriments continue to pain the tribes, which consider salmon part of their cultural and spiritual identity, as well as a crucial food source.

The government downplayed or accepted the well-known risk to the fish in its drive for industrial development, converting the wealth of the tribes into the wealth of non-Native people, according to the report.

“The government afforded little, if any, consideration to the devastation the dams would bring to Tribal communities, including to their cultures, sacred sites, economies, and homes,” the report said.

It added: “Despite decades of efforts and an enormous amount of funding attempting to mitigate these impacts, salmon stocks remain threatened or endangered and continued operation of the dams perpetuates the myriad adverse effects.”

The Interior Department’s report comes amid a $1 billion effort announced earlier this year to restore the region’s salmon runs before more become extinct — and to better partner with the tribes on the actions necessary to make that happen.

That includes increasing the production and storage of renewable energy to replace hydropower generation that would be lost if four dams on the lower Snake River are ever breached. Tribes, conservationists and even federal scientists say that would be the best hope for recovering the salmon, providing the fish with access to hundreds of miles of pristine habitat and spawning grounds in Idaho.