vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

It’s a few days late, but CBS.com has finally posted the Letterman segment with author Bill McKibben. (Fast forward to the last 10 minutes of the video.)

Since I am probably the only McKibben reader who continues to own and use a TV set, I got to see this segment on its original air date. He forcefully argues that not only do we have to act to save the planet, but that we can.

…Nobel Peace Prize, here’s a lucid and elequent congratulatory essay by local-boy-made-good (and done good) Alex Steffen.

I first knew Steffen when he ran Steelhead, one of the most intelligent and handsome local zines this burg has ever produced.

Since then, he’s traveled much of the world, written a lot of important things, and in 2003 guest-edited the last, never-printed, issue of Whole Earth magazine, the last descendant of Stewart Brand’s old Whole Earth Catalog.

You’ll find vast acreage of smart prose by Steffen and compatriots at WorldChanging.com, his site dedicated to “bright green” eco-solutions.

I’m currently halfway through the huge (600-plus pages) WorldChanging book, edited by Steffen and written by himself and several dozen appropriate-tech experts. (Gore contributed a short introduction.)

WorldChanging’s shtick has been described as an update of the Whole Earth “Access to Tools” shtick, adapted for a generation of bloggers and a post-WTO sensibility.

Unlike a lot of the gloom-n’-doom nihilism preached by eco-leftists, Steffen and his team concentrate on solutions to the planet’s big and small problems. The book covers everything from urban planning and refugee camps to renewable energy and adequate water supplies. The emphasis throughout is on Things We Can Really Do About It.

If Barack Obama bills himself as the politician of hope, Steffen is its scribe.

As Steffen writes in his Gore piece today:

“If we do our jobs right, life will get better. The systems we currently rely on don’t just destroy the environment, they limit our happiness. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. We know it is possible to create lives which are not only profoundly more sustainable, but more prosperous, comfortable, stylish, healthy, safe and fun. If we do our jobs right, a bright green future will be downright sexy.”

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.