Wielechowski/French Challenge Governor; Plastic Gyre and Kobuk at Museum - Preview Post

I rode through the light drizzle this morning to check on the press conference being held by Rep. Bill Wielechowski and Sen. Hollis French challenging the governor to stand by his claims.  It was scheduled at the Legislative Information Office which doesn't have any walls at the moment.  I thought that would make an interesting backdrop and I needed to get on my bike and get some exercise.

In this post I'll just give a preview of future posts.

Here are the two legislators at their red oil barrel.  Basically, they said the governor has been pushing SB 21 as legislation that would increase oil production and state revenues compared to the previous tax structure ACES.

Sen. French and Rep. Wielechowski showed in the charts the governor's own agencies' predictions that production and revenue will go down.

They challenged the governor to call a legislative session to pass legislation that says, "If by 2018, SB 21 does not increase oil production by 1 barrel or increase revenue by $1, then ACES would be applied to oil companies retroactively."

I'll put up more details and some video later.

Since the rain had gotten a little more serious by the time I got out of the meeting, I decided to stop at the museum and give it a chance to lighten up a bit.  I'd been wanting to see the GYRE exhibit - about the plastic continents floating in the Pacific - anyway.

WOW!  Everyone should go.  I'll put up more, but here's sneak peek.

 Scientific information of the GYRE is there, but the key is that artists have been invited to do pieces to help bring this issue home.


This "Present From The Pacific"is part of a much bigger piece by Steve McPherson.  I chose the lego pieces to highlight because it  should resonate with most people.  These are items found in the sea or washed up on beaches, packaged into gifts.



This exhibit will be here for the summer - then it travels the world.  We're the first city to see it.  Take the kids.  Don't put it off until September, you might want to go back.

And, of course, this does relate to the press conference I'd just been at, because . . .


. . .well of course, the vast majority of today's plastic comes from petroleum.

I'll have to go back and see if the museum made that connection.  I didn't see it there.

Another exhibit I almost missed because it's all by itself on the top floor is a series of photos of the Kobuk sand dunes and some explanation of how scientists today are studying the dunes to get clues about the sand dunes of Mars.

Kobuk Sand Dunes from photo at Anchorage Museum

And then I got back on my bike in something a little more than a drizzle and made my way to the bike trail which is so incredibly beautiful now, even in the rain.  Flowing down the green trail on my bike seems to cleanse me of the detritus of civilization (like the plastic gyre).