Maybe there is no decorative glass in the Green Utopia. No triple cheeseburgers. No macchias.

The Seattle of my youth was a laid-back medium-size city with a sense of humor. This proves once and for all that such a place no longer exists.

No sense of humor???? C'mon, Orino, I thought my post was kinda funny. How 'bout this? No triple cheeseburgers. No ikebanas! How's that?

Seriously?

"...With two 1,000-pound day tanks, and seven glory holes, a public-access glass studio could easily produce 480 metric tons of carbon per year, or the equivalent annual output of approximately 70 cars.."
Ninety glass studios? Oh dear. Wait till you count the number of Pottery Kilns, and Welders Torches out there.

Are you really so upset by a privately funded Chihuly museum that THIS is the issue you want to bring to the debate?

Wow. And how much carbon in burned running WEB SITE servers 24/7? The heat generated and the AC needed to cool one good bank of servers, say at Crosscut, I bet it would equal the carbon footprint of 70 cars.

Have you ever measured the therms of all the Grill type restaurants in Seattle? Grilled food providers could be the next big issue. BK, notice has been served! Should we levy a carbon tax on cremation?

Have you looked at Mariners Extra Innings and Carbon Emissions? What about the extra heat generated from longer games than expected on TV and Radio?

70 cars a day?.

If you bulldozed Key Arena, all the theaters, the Pacific Science Center, Fisher Pavilion, Memorial Stadium and the Needle, you would STILL have less open space than a lot of existing Seattle Parks, like Seward, Magnuson, Discovery, Lincoln, and Green Lake just to cite a few.

And MORE than 70 cars a day drive to all of these. Pretty sure of it.

Knute -

Never let it be said that you don't get people thinking. This issue of carbon neutrality seems like it has the potential to be devastating to the economies of American cities.

Obviously a glass blowing shop is not carbon neutral. By that measure how can someone like Richard Conlin support it if he supports a carbon neutral city? So now we're put in the position of a government employee apparently deciding what businesses are acceptable and which ones are not based on whether they feel like supporting carbon neutrality or not. Apparently the government is happy to turn a blind eye to this famous artist who would apparently bring in some bucks for the city government.

Since a glass blowing business is not carbon neutral, how about if the glass shop bought all of their glass pieces from China and then just sold them. Is that carbon neutral? You can see where this discussion leads. The question that Knute I think is implicitly raising is that where we want to drive our economy? It's a profound and extremely far reaching issue.

"By that measure how can someone like Richard Conlin support it if he supports a carbon neutral city?"

Well he supports carbon neutrality for the other guy. You know, the knuckle-dragging Joe Sixpack (and all the "dirty" industries that employ him). There's always exceptions for good liberals. Just like growth management. It's only the blue-collar (and the poor!) that we, really, want to squeeze into urban zoos. The rest, you know... the smart ones... they can live in the suburbs and blow glass to their heart's content.

It's nice to see you, finally, waking up to the hypocrisy (or at the very least, the inconsistencies) of the social-engineering class.

If the furnaces were powered with electricity, and that source is City Light, and City Light is carbon neutral or better, than isn't the question moot if the furnace emissions are filtered or cleaned some how? I'm assuming there is some off-gassing in the glass manipulation process that would need to be dealt with but don't really know.

The criticism of Richard Conlin's seeming support of glass blowing in general and Chilhuly in particular in relation to his stance on our city's carbon policy being presented as somehow hypocritical seems a sophomoric canard at best. I should hope that our goal of carbon neutrality would be more sophisticated than an piecemeal cherry picking of GHG contributers without regard to other benefits they may bring. Perhaps Dale's (or knuckle draggin' Joe Sixpack's) business is worth the carbon output and/or that output can be mitigated somewhere else. Perhaps with some creative engineering other solutions present themselves.

I would agree that there needs to be a discussion as to how to best encourage a sustainable economic model for our City in light of anthropogenic climate change and that top down decrees of any industry's relative worth by a "government employee" is not ideal. But to use the tone of some aggravated tea bagging jerk off is hardly constructive and not well suited to discourse (not that calling someone a tea baggin jerk off is, either, but I must be indulged in this instance).

And, for the record, the notion of a Chihuly museum at Seattle Center is, in my view, appalling for legitimate reasons that need not be so tenuous an association.

Let me be clear, troutbum the anonymous, I don't support carbon neutrality. It just seems to monumentally impossible, if it's even needed. Plus as corrupted and criminal-infested our federal government is, I would never support anything that gives more power to the federal government. I also find it curious why part of the solution isn't to plant more trees, which clean our environment as part of their natural function.

If we want to become more carbon neutral, the first thing that the President and Congress (and you) should support is ending the illegal foreign wars under the false pretend was of the 'war on terror'. Just imagine how much carbon is emitted every day by the bombers, airplanes, tanks, trucks, depleted uranium weapons being deployed in the Middle East.

This whole discussion of 'carbon neutrality' is a sophomoric canard when President Obama is engaged in 2 illegal, undeclared wars and now he's mobilizing for another undeclared, illegal bombing war against Iran. I think someone like Knute would be the perfect author to compare and contrast how Congress wants to pass Carbon Exchange legislation while engaging in these wasteful carbon un-neutral wars being fought on false claims backed up by fraudulent evidence.

It's all in how you spin it, Richard. Climate Change - as we've all been told - is anthropogenic. People are destroying the planet. Kill people, save the planet. War is green.

Aside from the other pros and cons of the proposed glass museum at Seattle Center, there is one potential advantage to the location. "Waste" heat from the furnaces could be used to heat other Seattle Center buildings and the hot water they need. This would mitigate the carbon impact of the glass production in a way that is not practical if the glass is produced in a rural area far from other buildings.