Another Green World

This is why I don't trust Democrats

Last Friday, I watched Kerncrest and Los Angeles Audubon go down in defeat to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which plans to go ahead the Pine Tree Wind Project in the Mojave desert despite Audubon's claims that migrating songbirds will be imperiled by the turbines.

Too bad Audubon doesn't have on its side powerful Democrats in cahoots with Big Oil, or an enviromentalist lawyer like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the way the opponents of Cape Wind Associates do. The Nantucket Sound Cape Wind project, to be sited miles offshore, would provide three-quarters of the Cape's electricity; objections to it come from the fishing and tourism industries, but the main problem is aesthetic: Locals just don't like the look of wind turbines (personally, I think they're cool. Put them on the hill up here in Hollywood any time).

However you stand on viewsheds vs. wind, you can object to the shoddy, back-door methods opponents in government are using against Cape Wind. Two weeks ago, a clandestine congressional committee sent forth an amendment to the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act that would allow Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to veto the project. Sen. Ted Kennedy has admitted to encouraging fellow Senators to pass this amendment to the act, which Congress plans to vote on April 24. Says Greenpeace:

"Congress likes to talk about cleaning up their act in the wake of the Abramoff scandal, but if you look behind the closed-door attack on America’s first offshore wind farm, it’s business as usual."

You can express your opposition by sending a fax from here:

If you're in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Providence, Las Vegas or New York, you can also participate in an emergency rally to save Cape Wind tomorrow (Thursday) at 5 p.m.

Click here for more information.

The upside of Chernobyl

"The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost, and I must say that I started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl."

Mikhail Gorbachev on Chernobyl, 20 years after. I'll post more on this as the April 26 anniversary looms.

As gas in L.A. tops $3/gal. . .

. . . it's useful to ponder how we got here:

In this fascinating little cartoon, produced by the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, you can see how thoroughly oil was sold to the American public as an egalitarian, patriotic value ("Anyone in the USA willing to risk it can drill for oil!") as well as how, backed by a powerful lobby, it became the lifeblood of manufacturing ("fabrics, toothbrushes, insecticides . . . "). The Martians substitute neatly for Soviets; the Ogg-powerful leader looks like Stalin, and competition+oil=happiness for all. It's beautifully animated, and bald in its pronouncements.

Of course there's no mention of climactic influence or pollution (or dying baby walruses); burning coal to heat homes was so much worse. It makes me wonder what we're making cartoons about now that will come back bite us later. Or what we should be making cartoons about.

Tenemos un convoy

Miguel Lopez of the Teamsters is reporting that the newly formed (I think) Los Angeles Troquero Collective has planned a rally at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for noon on April 27, and a general strike on May 1. The Teamsters are behind the rally, but not the strike. They're demanding a 25 percent increase in pay, although where that's going to come from isn't certain -- most of what the truckers make gets sucked up in state and local fees, insurance, repairs (far fewer than they need -- I have seen the bald tires) and rising fuel costs. They're also demanding better working conditions.

Why this matters to an environmental blog: As Grist's recent series on poverty and the environment proves, you cannot talk about pollution without talking about the economics that create it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the working lives of truckers. That black smoke you see belching out of those aging trucks? A trucker supporting a family on $25,000 a year isn't going to spend the $5,000 or $10,000 to fix it; the truck would have to break down first. Those bald tires? The $300 for each one will get spent when the rubber blows off on the freeway, not before. It's a dangerous and dirty business, and it's kept that way by the trucking and shipping lines who on one hand use the drivers' plight as a buffer against regulation, and on the other hand load every possible expense onto the truckers' shoulders. On top of it all, PierPass's off-peak hours program has spread work out through the night; truckers say they can't make a living anymore on an eight-hour day.

And so far, we haven't heard much from them. Most are immigrants from Mexico or Central America (although I've seen a few Sikhs down at the ports behind the wheel); few speak functional English; all but a relic few works as "independent owner/operators," which means they own and maintain their own equipment, which they then lease to the trucking company. They're treated as independent contractors, which means they have neither benefits nor job security, but they're still utterly dependent upon big shipping lines and trucking companies for work.

So I'm interested to watch how this all turns out. There's no way of going back to a regulated trucking industry, and it's unlikely the state of California or the federal government is going to subsidize cleaner, safer trucks to the extent that's necessary. That leaves the responsibility with the trucking industry itself. Is there a way to make it pay?

Some relevant facts:

The California Air Resources Board estimates that 12,000 on-road heavy duty diesel-fueled trucks, each with a maximum capacity of 80,000 pounds for both truck and cargo, operate out of California's three largest ports (Long Beach, Los Angeles and Oakland). Each make two to three trips per day.

Port trucks generate just over 7,000 tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx, which is believed to be the major contributor to surface ozone) and 564 tons of toxic particulate matter (PM) per year -- 23 percent of all port-related NOx and nine percent of port-related PM.

Seventy-two percent of those trucks, according to an ARB estimate in 2002, are older than 1993 and run on older, high-polluting engines. Only 28 percent can be retrofitted to cleaner technology. Upgrading the aging fleet to significantly reduce emissions would cost anywhere from $180 million to $200 million.

Find out who's messing with your neighborhood

The US EPA's Toxic Release Inventory for 2004 is out. It's fun if you like to play with numbers -- you can see just how bad the biggest polluters pollute, where and with what. There's a movement afoot to scale back the TRI, so enjoy it while you can. Here's a hint: Skip right to the TRI Explorer page and start playing around with locations and facilities. See what you find. This stuff is for the public, after all, so the public ought to get busy using it.

From crunching a few numbers in my part of the country (Los Angeles County), I find that the facilities reporting the most toxic releases include: Quemetco (battery recyclers); the Shell, Chevron and Exxon-Mobil refineries; and Ball Metal Beverage Containers in Torrance, which emits 100,000 pounds of the glycol ethers, mostly into the air, a known cause of anemia, respiratory disease and birth defects.

Is it possible to make cans without emitting "certain" glycol ethers? Or is that impossibly naive?

Fixing the levees: It's all in the timing

Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, hailed the Senate committee's action and said she believes it will be sustained in the House. "This is very critical," she said. "People in the House have seen our levees, and the seriousness of the risk."

I'll say.

The Senate Appropriations Committee just approved $22.3 million in emergency levee repair for California, something the House rejected. It was a pretty good day for that sort of thing.

Floods are bad for business

Can you trust this man with your planet?

He's the man everybody's quoting today in opposition to the climate change control bill introduced in the state assembly (a new version should be up later today), on the heels of Schwarzenegger's Climate Change Action Team Final Report . A slightly scarier report, from last spring, is here.

"I think it would be a big mistake," is what the man in this photo thinks of the legislation (according to the not-free Wall Street Journal. Write to me if you want to read the whole thing, but it's really not necessary).

Relevant nuggets from the reports: Over 41 percent of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide) come from transportation sources; carbon-emitting fossil-fuel combustion accounts for 81 percent. Because more hot days means more inversion, "the number of days meteorologically conducive to pollution formation may rise by 75 to 85 percent" by century's end in places like Riverside and the stinky San Joaquin Valley; by the end of that same freaky century, the Sierra snowpack could be down by 90 percent. With rising sea levels, the California Delta may just dissolve into the sea (that sure saves us a bundle on levee repairs, doesn't it?). The southern-ranging pink bollworm will migrate northward to ravage the state's lucrative cotton crops. Pine pitch canker, a pathogen once limited to the coasts that has already found its way inland, will devour the trees of our mountain forests.

What is it exactly about climate change legislation that the this guy worries will hamper our economic growth? A couple of months ago he warned that "we must ensure that California's ability to create and retain jobs" is not "compromised" by the state's efforts to reduce climate emissions, even though last year California's ability to create and retain jobs was somewhat compromised when he recruited workers in India to help get the governor's propositions on the ballot.

Why do reporters quote these people? 'Cause, after all, some folks at Berkeley actually think the drive to mitigate greenhouse gases could be a good thing for the state coffers, even without the doomsday predictions.

The Immigrant Trail

My friend Coco Conn shot some great footage, photos and short videos, of Saturday's protest march against the House bill that would, among other things, make it a criminal offense to provide health care to an undocumented worker. People have been asking: Why can't we get this many people out for an anti-war march? I guess because immigrants' rights are more clear-cut. We don't know what we should do in Iraq. We do know you can't deny a significant portion of the American workforce basic dignities.

I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with how civil rights and a healthy environment are all tied up together. Grist has an excellent series going on poverty and the environment (the pertinent farmworker story is here). I've been talking to people in this city who are about to be held responsible for air pollution but don't have the resources to solve anything. And would a less beleaguered workforce object more strenuously to being exposed to pesticides and fertilitzers that make them ill? (See that Grist piece)

We're gonna go organic

This just in:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is throwing its weight behind organic products, a move that experts say could have the same lasting effect on environmental practices that Wal-Mart has had on prices by forcing suppliers and competitors to keep up. Putting new items on the shelf this year, from organic cotton baby clothes to ocean fish caught in ways that don't harm the environment, is part of a broader green policy launched last year to meet consumer demand, cut costs for things like energy and packaging and burnish a battered reputation.

I don't . . . even . . . know . . . what to say.

(Except that if good environmental practices don't come hand-in-hand with human rights and good labor practices, they don't mean crap.)

"What has happened to our capacity for outrage?"

I haven't blogged much lately because I've been out in the world, talking to people and haven't spent so much time at the computer. This is a good thing.

But I've also not been blogging because, after a certain point, you get depressed. You start to want to write about nice things, local things: like the man who runs the bike shop down the street, or my friends who go to great lengths to free their lives of petroleum.

Listening to this speech by Hodding Carter (you remember: Carter was Carter's State Department spokesman), however, which came over the transom on the Society of Environmental Journalists Watchdog list, I got religion again. "Are we in the press too sophisticated to rage?" he asks. "Do we think it unseemly for well-educated men and women in business suits to behave like a revolutionary rabble?"

Okay. So here are the things that have pissed me off in the last month:

On March 8th, the house passed H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity in Food Act, which would effectively nullify California's Proposition 65 by making it illegal for state's to establish their own food-labeling rules. I believe there's an amendment in it so we can still warn about mercury in fish, but if it gets through the Senate, the legislation will make it more difficult for people in California to make decisions about their food.

Halibut live to be 100 years, and we're fishing them out faster than they can reproduce.

A company funded 95 percent by ExxonMobil, Public Interest Watch, lobbied for an IRS audit of Greenpeace (in the Wall Street Journal and on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!)

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled March 7, in NRDC v. EPA, et al., that environmental groups cannot bring cases against the rules of regulatory agencies unless they can prove that one of their members will be harmed by the rule. The case was about the EPA allowing big agricultural exemptions to the ban on the pesticide methyl bromide (had your house tented lately?) which depletes ozone faster than you can say chrlorofluorocarbon. As the NRDC could not prove that one of their members would be harmed by the exemption, the judge through the case out. It sets an evil precedent.

There's more but I've run out of time -- the other problem with blogging.