Page 2 - Locus Focus News Today

The last 10 miles of the Willamette River have been designated as a Superfund Site, a federal designation for the worst contaminated areas in the United States. The North Reach of the Willamette is one of the most complex Superfund Sites in the country. This highly contaminated stretch of the Willamette starts at the confluence with the Columbia River and extends to the

Lawmakers and advocates have called upon Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to launch an investigation into NW Natural for misleading consumers about the health impacts from gas. In their letter to Rosenblum they detail how NW Natural has taken a leaf from the tobacco industry in misleading consumers about the dangerous toxins emitted from their gas cookstoves. 

Before Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7 we were mainly aware of two existential threats: the impending death of democracy and climate catastrophe. But that attack and Israel’s unrelenting response has split our attention and overwhelmed us with a barrage of issues that we cannot ignore. On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with long time labor, climate and

Woody biomass has become the fossil-fuel industry’s renewable, green savior but this source of energy is fraught with problems. British energy giant Drax has proposed building a wood biomass processing and export facility in Longview, Washington, that would use one million tons of wood each year, to grind into pellets and ship to east Asia for burn in industrial power plants.

This past September the World Forestry Center sponsored an annual conference called “Who Will Own the Forests,” attended by the most notorious representatives in the Wall Street timber industry. There they schemed on perfecting the financialization of forest ecosystems, expanding greenwashing, carbon trading, biomass, and land grabs in Cascadia and around the globe.

For the past year a coalition of climate and social justice activists have been presenting a series of monthly Rumble On The River community forums that bring together expert voices to explain the risks of having 90% of Oregon’s fuel stored within city limits at the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub along the Willamette River. This month the Rumble broadens its focus to

We still have a brief window of opportunity to avoid the worst impacts of climate change if we drastically and quickly begin to cut all carbon emissions. However meaningful efforts to achieve these cuts are being undermined by the heavy use of carbon offsets, which allow businesses to claim a lower carbon footprint by paying someone else to reduce emissions, while these

The United States’ food system has become a corporate-dominated marketplace, strangled by an elite few, that holds farmers and consumers hostage to greed. Currently Congress is negotiating the 19th Farm Bill which is an opportunity to pass a fair Farm Bill for all, after decades of government-sponsored corporate consolidation of the companies that control our food system. 

The Port of Columbia County, along the Columbia River northwest of Portland, has been trying to expand industrial development by rezoning valuable agricultural land for industrial use. But many farmers in the area have a different vision for the future of their community.

At a critical bend in the Columbia River Estuary, a company called NEXT Renewable Fuels, Inc., is seeking to build a new, massive renewable diesel refinery. The proposed refinery at Port Westward would be one of the largest producers of renewable diesel on the West Coast. Meanwhile along the North Reach of Willamette River in Portland, Zenith Energy, which has been shipping