Tuesday, Jul. 28, 2009

Have you been smoking with the caterpillar, Mr. Chopp?

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

Seems like our good speaker of the House, Rep. Frank Chopp, has been reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

And the Seattle Democrat has been borrowing from Humpty Dumpty, who’s famous for telling Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

For the good Mr. Chopp, that means he can use that current environmental buzzword — “renewable” — and tell a Tri-City audience this about hydropower:

“Why it gets classified as not renewable is beyond me.”

“It clearly is renewable and why it isn’t classified as such is absurd.”

“In California they can count our hydropower as renewable, but we can’t count it here.”

All these comments came during a recent Tri-City visit and were written down by Herald reporter Michelle Dupler.

In the Tri-Cities, they played pretty well, because we have many people who know just where the hydropower comes from and can see its benefits and who think Initiative 937 was misguided in stipulating that hydropower is not “renewable.”

But by saying it is renewable, Mr. Chopp has upset his very greenest constituents, who think their power must be only the perfect shade of green — a hue best concocted by a mix of power extracted from wind, solar and conservation technologies.

Never, never, never could it be hydropower. Nor, gasp, could it come from that source too profane even to utter west of the Cascades: NUCLEAR.

That’s for the barbaric Swedes!

So, Mr. Chopp apologetically has phoned one of the highest priest-lobbyists of green, Mr. Clifford Traisman of Washington Conservation Voters. Mr. Chopp reswore allegiance to I-937, denied he exactly said such things, insisted he was misconstrued and invoked the Humpty Dumpty doctrine of politics.

For when Alice replied to Humpty Dumpty: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things,” his answer was:

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

And for Mr. Chopp, the master clearly wears green.

Though he might want to have a word with a few other folks in his home town.

For starters, Seattle City Light and its website, which proclaims:

“Seattle’s long tradition of clean, renewable energy began in 1905 with the Cedar Falls hydroelectric plant.”

Maybe Mr. Traisman can straighten them out for you, Mr. Speaker.

w Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

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