Environment

Competing With L.A. For Smog

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Boise is quickly qualifying for another of those “Top Ten” lists, but this time it will be for “worst air quality of business friendly cities in America.” GUARDIAN reader Eagle Eye sent us this photo made last Saturday.

Comments & Discussion

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  1. gosh, is this air due to the “buy Idaho” growth paid for by our tax dollars?

  2. Mike Murphy
    Jun 7, 2007, 7:30 am

    …and the Band played on…

  3. Native Idahoan
    Jun 7, 2007, 8:11 am

    Welcome to Idafornia. I’m all about kicking the folks from California out and send them to where they came from. All the good land is going away to be replaced with crap houses that last a year and then fall down the crapper – which is helping to drive property taxes up AND making the air quality worse.

  4. This “native thing” is getting quite tiresome. I don’t know how to tell you native Idahoan but there’s more of them than you.

    So if everyone is going to kick anyone out, I’m afraid your gonna have to find a new place to live. (this may not be quite as silly as your post, but it is close)
    Any way, I don’t know what the big deal is.

    Mayor Dave and his buddies have been telling us for years (4 to be axact) that we reside in the “most liveable city in the nation”! I think the Guardian has hit upon the source of all of City halls problems. Their “vision” has been obscured by this crappy air we breath.

  5. My family is from California, but we’ve been here longer than many natives (36 years). Last Summer while camping I met an old guy who’s family moved to Idaho from Romania. In a strong accent he told me that he’s lived in Idaho for 50 years. I responded “wow, you’ve been here way longer than I have.”

    By the way, I was recently informed that more people are moving to Idaho from the East Coast than from any other region in the country. Which makes sense considering that one of the great migrations in U.S. history has been from the Northeast United States to the Southwest United States, mainly Arizona. Of course, look what Arizona has become…yikes.

    EDITOR NOTE–Do people in Arizona fear “becoming another Boise?”

  6. How STUNNING and SHOCKING to have so much smog this time of year. Haven’t seen the talking heads ACTUALLY BASCIALY wetting their diggers over that list yet. The reporters THEY just must have overlooked this aspect of the land of milk and honey.

    This smog must have been from all those 2C natives in their untaxed cars. Or was that the day I burned all the old truck tires that the local dumps will no longer take??? At any rate it looks like a poster picture the the Chamber of Commerce weenies should use.

    Moved here 36 years back (oooh!) or a whole 50 years ago (woww)?? B.F.D! The new easterner that edits the Kuna Melba paper thinks HE should be an Idahoan after eight MONTHS because HE bought an old tent trailer. . .

  7. Reducing miles driven is the fastest way to cut smog.

    -The city of Boise should be focused on infill projects and not the desert to the south.
    -The people of Boise need to learn not to jump into their car to pickup a gallon of milk 2 miles away.
    -The employers of Boise need to provide incentives for employees using transportation other than Single Occupant Cars(SOV)
    -The churches of Boise should join in too. Read more here- http://tinyurl.com/2w3xtg

    By the way, more factors than growth and cars help contribute to our air quality conditions. Daily weather conditions and geography determine whether the air quality deteriorates from one day to the next. We do have exponential more “bad” days in recent years, but measuring Boise against L.A. does not portray an accurate picture.

  8. Last saturday I had trouble breathing as long as I was outdoors until I sat on an A/C bus.Sunday I hid in my one A/C room with some cold beer. The heat ( no moisture) is terrible but the air quality is nauseating. It’s cause is OBVIOUS!! Every idiot in idaho has got to have their own car, the bigger and chromier ( oh, and the more noise it makes!) the better.

    No one walks any more and those on a bike don’t get any respect from our road ragers. Both City Hall and our State govt. have chosen to ignore financing the bus system or any other type of mass transit and so…. Stand on the corner of 10’th and Front or Myrtle and count the number of cars with more than one person. You’ll get .5%. Then count the idiots going thru a red light. You’ll get 5%. Gas is now at $3.50 /gal.and I hope will soon be at $5.00/gal.

    Once Idahoans get used to bending over as they pump their gas reality may begin to dawn on them.. ” Gosh, this cost’s way too much, and it smells out here too!!!”

  9. Maybe a bumper sticker thats hard to remove.
    “I’m a gas hog. I polute and proud of it.”

    Then when ever we walk through a parking lot we can paste them on the bumper’s of the 4X4’s and SUV’s. Maybe that will get there attention.
    Might be illegal!

  10. I am suprised you have nothing on this……With 20,000 new homes proposed in Foothills north of Eagle, planners anticipate increased traffic, wider roads

  11. Clancy you’re post makes the most sense, I just wish it was a little more common.

  12. I forgot to add one great way to reduce miles driven. Banks and mortgage companies should factor in distance from a person’s place of employment when they apply for a home loan. That would limit the numbers of people buying in Nampa and commuting to Micron.

  13. blazing Saddle
    Jun 8, 2007, 1:57 pm

    The word native, which rhymes with old-fart in most of Idaho, nudged me out of my slumber. Ol Clancy up there says “way, more factors than growth and cars help contribute to our air quality conditions.”

    That statement reminds me that in days of yore Boise didn’t have smog, it had “Haze.”

    You can call it anything you want, but if you call it anything other than pollution, you’re got yer head in a hole a lot darker than anything an Awstrich ever imagined.

    These days Boise has two types of weather, winter inversions and summer high pressure ridges. In cowpoke terms, we’ve either got cold smog, or hot smog.

    My brain isn’t what it once was, but I can’t recall any of the hands on the lee side of the ranch ever claiming that there were “a lot of factors” that contribute to the size of the pile in the feedlot. You can take this to the bank; the more cows you put in the pen, the faster the manure piles up.

    There are some problems you just can’t “grow” your way out of. Until someone around here is ready to try something a tad more imaginative than “more sprawl”, the soup is jes gonna get thicker, deeper and more air-o-matic.

  14. Blaming smog on local growth is akin to….uh, sticking your head in the sand. It’s far bigger than simple local growth issues. It involves the all powerful automobile/petrochemical oligarchy.

    Air pollution is an issue that needs to be addressed at the State and Federal levels, since emissions easily travel past city and county boundaries. However, OUR State gov’t, in its current form, is most certainly incapable of solving the problem.

    So how can the problem be tackled? Let’s look at LA. LA’s air, though still bad, has improved greatly since the late ’70s. How? South Coast Air Quality Management District, that’s how. Google it, and learn.

    Of course you native Idahoan types would never ever go for the onerous restrictions mandated by South Coast AQMD. By gamby, them there’s californy folks.

    EDITOR NOTE– An ordinance simply stating, “Thou shalt not pollute” …whether from Canyon County or Chicago will do the job. Our law today says locals have to be INSPECTED, but allows vehicles from the entire USA to pass through and pollute. We stop them if they drive drunk or speed however.

  15. I have to post my old fogey report: when my brother and I went hiking in the hills in the 1950’s, we would look back at the valley where the air was practically black in the winter time -people heated their houses with coal at that time. In summer we had good air here.

  16. Before anyone kicks anyone out of Idaho just remember that if you are not Native American ie Indian – then you need to go as well.
    Sure I was born in Boise, but I know that I am just a part of this car driving, house building, noise making society we live in and (dare we admit it) add to.

  17. Hmmmm, according to some of the logic displayed above, I should be able to keep ANY salmon that I can elbow my way in to the hordes of sportsmen and catch!
    After all, genetically, Hatchery (transplanted) and Wild (Native) salmon are all the same, Right?
    Or would it would be more demonstrative to reference the identically appearing pen raised “dump and shoot within twenty minutes” pheasants to the born in the wild ring necks that live from one season to the next?

    On a side note, we just now returned from a mandatory but dreaded journey to the VA grounds on Fort St. It was a “Sweltering” 75 degrees today and casual observation would indicate that four out of five vehicles, even the little dual fuel shoeboxes on wheels, had their windows up and the air conditioning on. I’ll bet THAT lowers fuel use and hydro carbons. But since the SMOG in our little aquarium just CAN”T be from MORE people moving here, why not? It would seem that even many of the green people are actually a closeted brown color.

  18. Actually dh, the genetics of hatchery fish and wild fish is exactly the issue. Hatchery fish lack genetic diversity having come from largely the same stock. The sockeye run in Idaho is virtually extinct because all progeny now come from three (3) fish. Ask any boiologist and they’ll tell you the biggest environmental issue today ain’t global warming its the loss of biodiversity.

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