California Senate Bill 1019 (Mark Leno, D-San Francisco) passed the state Assembly’s Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection by a 10-2 vote Tuesday. This was the second test in the Assembly of the measure, which would compel manufacturers of upholstered furniture to disclose on product tags if an item being sold contains flame-retardant chemicals.
In an investigative feature published the same day by Capital & Main, reporter Gary Cohn explored the connections between the chemicals and carcinogens, decreased fertility, hormone disruption and lower IQ development. In Cohn’s story, two California firefighters who had survived cancer stated they believed their cancers resulted from exposure to the flame retardants, which release toxic fumes when exposed to flame.
Leno’s bill, which received the endorsement of the Sacramento Bee Sunday, has gathered support from the Republican sides of the Senate and Assembly aisles. It must now face debate and an August vote in the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee,
» Read more about: Flame Retardant Bill Clears Assembly Hurdle »
People vacation on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i to swim, snorkel and surf. And to unplug. We did. For three weeks. My wife and I also spent one Saturday night at a rally supporting a ballot initiative to control the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and pesticides on the island. Admittedly, not the most touristy thing to do.
Part of the draw was Makana, which means “gift” in Hawaiian, which he surely is. Makana has been hailed as Hawaii’s greatest young slack-key musician and songwriter. You may know him because he wrote a song, “We Are the Many,” that became the anthem of the Occupy Movement. Slack-key, which characterizes Hawaiian music, was the legacy of Mexican cowboys, who came to the island as contract workers over a century ago – the beginning of a long history of workers imported there from other countries.
We were also interested because we had stumbled across the anti-GMO movement while exploring the island a year ago.
Energy efficiency is the Swiss Army Knife of public policy. It’s Veg-o-matic. It slices and dices. No matter the question, energy efficiency just might be the answer.
What technology saves you money on your utility bill? How can businesses become more competitive? What reduces greenhouse gas emissions at the lowest cost? Energy efficiency is the correct answer to all-of-the-above.
Now add another benefit: energy efficiency can help prepare us for climate change.
Think about the hot summer days when electricity use skyrockets. On L.A.’s hottest day on record – 113° Fahrenheit on September 27, 2010 – LADWP delivered a whopping 6,177 megawatts. It was the all-time high in power demand, mainly to power air-conditioners and refrigerators.
But, when the grid is overtaxed, there’s also a high likelihood of power outages. More than an inconvenience, blackouts are a public health problem. During the Chicago heat wave of 1995,
» Read more about: It Slices, It Dices – the Magic of Energy Efficiency »
Earth Day is the birthday of the modern environmental movement in the U.S. and across the globe. Today, on this 44th Earth Day, the City of Los Angeles – the second largest in the nation and a mighty economic engine on the West Coast—celebrates its commitment to environmental protections and sustainability with a model Zero Waste ordinance just signed into law by Mayor Eric Garcetti. The days when the city sent three to four million tons of trash to landfills every year from apartment and commercial buildings are ending. Now, Los Angeles is set to achieve the highest recycling rates and best standards of environmental protection from the greenhouse gas emissions, air and groundwater pollution, and loss of recyclable material resources associated with our waste management.
Landfilling or burning millions of tons of trash subjects our residents and our environment to a distressing assault. Landfills and poorly regulated facilities disproportionately impact low income communities of color—as these communities are either employed or housed in close proximity,
On Tuesday — April Fools’ Day no less — Los Angeles’ City Council nearly unanimously approved the Zero Waste LA Franchise System, which would make it the first and largest city nationally to adopt a robust plan to move towards Zero Waste. The Zero Waste LA Franchise System, under the direction of the City of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation, will transform the antiquated waste and recycling system that currently serves apartment dwellers and businesses. In its place will emerge an innovative model for the nation. This new system will carve the city into 11 waste service zones intended to boost recycling and provide strong customer service – a similar success found in the city’s single-family waste and recycling programs.
The Zero Waste LA franchise plan specifically requires trash-hauling companies to bid for exclusive contracts to operate in the 11 waste service zones. This will help the city to meet its Zero Waste goals,
» Read more about: Los Angeles City Council Boldly Approves Zero Waste LA Plan »
The movement to make Los Angeles the country’s largest city to employ an exclusive franchise system for hauling its commercial and multi-family waste drew tantalizingly close to completion today, as the City Council voted 12-1 to replace the current Byzantine hodgepodge of trash pickup routes servicing businesses and apartment buildings with a completely different model. The historic vote took place this morning, with Councilman Bernard Parks providing the lone dissenting vote. Because the vote was not unanimous, a final vote must take place April 8.
Although the City of L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation provides hauling service for houses and four-unit apartment complexes, a wild frontier system characterizes the remaining commercial and residential pickups, resulting in fleets of trash trucks, whose owners often pay their workers low wages, crisscrossing the city on uncoordinated schedules. The consequence has been extra wear and tear on roads, and increased air pollution.
The new system will divide the city into 11 pickup zones,
» Read more about: Historic Victory for Zero-Waste Campaign »
With all the hoopla about the centenary of the L.A. Aqueduct last week, I looked again at an article on a related piece of our history – the birth of public power. The early 20th Century was an age not entirely unlike our own, with high levels of inequality and most of the wealth controlled by a powerful few. It was in this climate that Los Angeles’ labor unions and working class communities fought for a publicly owned energy utility, to be sold at cost.
Jeff Stansbury argued in a 2011 L.A. Times opinion piece that while the reformers of the day are often credited for bringing public power to the city, they had actually allied themselves with L.A.’s three private electric companies, which wanted to control the power that would be generated by the aqueduct’s hydroelectric plants. Meanwhile, the Central Labor Council, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other unions pushed for a citywide straw poll in 1911 that would come down on the side of municipal power for homes and businesses.
» Read more about: The Birth of a Public Utility, the Future of a City »
As every resident of the Southland must know by now, this month marks the centennial of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. When, in 1913, the valves were first turned and water rushed down the last hillside between the Eastern Sierra and the San Fernando Valley, William Mulholland, the brilliant self-taught engineer who guided the project, and whose career would end when the St. Francis Dam collapsed, famously said, “There it is. Take it.”
A small group of anonymous but rich men already had. And they will again, if they can.
A hundred years ago, these self-styled “civic leaders” cooked up a plan that began by stealing all the water that flowed down the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. If you’ve seen Chinatown you know this plot. A faked water-shortage scare stampeded L.A. voters into supporting a bond measure that provided funds to purchase ranch and farm properties in the Owens Valley,
You may have seen Puente Hills while driving the 60 Freeway east of Los Angeles. It looks like a 700-acre, 450-foot-high, tree-covered mountain. However, only a few small hills were there when the facility opened in 1957. The mountain itself is made from seven decades of Southern California’s waste.
Puente Hills Landfill accepted its final truckloads of waste yesterday. Today, what was the country’s largest landfill is closed – a milestone in the environmental history of Southern California and the country.
Puente Hills had been taking in a third of the waste of Los Angeles County, as much as 13,000 tons per day at its recent peak. While some workers will remain for the next year-plus, putting a final cover on the site, hundreds of trucks that used to dump there every day will be headed elsewhere. Don’t Waste LA and others concerned for our environment and communities are working to make sure those trucks eventually head somewhere other than the next landfill on a new hillside.
» Read more about: We Don’t Need to Make Mountains of Waste Anymore »
(Note: A Halloween-themed rally will take place Thursday, October 31, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., outside BYD’s office, 1800 S. Figueroa St. (at W. 18th St.), downtown Los Angeles.)
It was with great excitement that California elected officials welcomed the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD) to build electric buses in places like Lancaster, Long Beach and Los Angeles. Hopes were high that BYD’s Zero Emissions buses would clean the air, and hundreds of Angelenos would go to work in BYD’s new downtown Los Angeles office, earning paychecks to support their families.
But this weekend, news reports revealed that the company’s promises of jobs and quality products couldn’t be more hollow. The California Department of Industrial Relations issued BYD numerous citations on October 10, fining the company $79,250 and requiring it to pay $20,000 in back wages to 22 employees.
City officials, according to the Los Angeles Times,
» Read more about: ‘Build Your Dreams’ Company a Nightmare for Workers »
(This article first appeared in the Sierra Club journal Sierra and is republished with permission.)
The late-June weekend heat wave comes on as predicted. By 10 a.m., it’s 90°F in a South Los Angeles parking lot where scores of local residents have gathered, lured by community leaders and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). Over the hum of the crowd, speakers take the stage for this Green the Block workshop: community organizers, environmentalists, labor union leaders and local politicians, all talking about the changing climate, the sputtering economy and the need to use less energy. It’s important stuff, but not particularly riveting. Meanwhile, it keeps getting hotter. By the time Ron Nichols, the utility’s general manager, takes the stage, the sun has chased people under canopies at either side of the lot and the chairs in front of him are almost empty.
» Read more about: Repowering Los Angeles One Block at a Time »
“Can Google Solve Death?” read the cover headline of a national news weekly. It cleverly enticed readers to read the story inside. The question also represents one of the major problems facing human beings. No, not death, but hubris.
Hubris was one of the themes of the great Greek tragedies in the fifth century before the Common Era. The Greek playwrights like Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles understood all too well the capacity of humans to extend themselves beyond their ability to limit the damage caused by their actions.
So great families disintegrated, monarchs fell and society itself came close to collapse – all because people in power could not stop themselves from reaching beyond their limitations as human beings. We do the same, but in new ways with unknown consequences.
Global climate change comes instantly to mind. Last spring, for the first time in human history,
One in four adolescents in California—nearly one million—aren’t getting as much physical activity as they need to maintain a healthy weight. When a young Latino child living in a highly industrialized community gets out to play, how much good does that physical activity do her growing lungs if she’s inhaling a toxic soup of air pollution and greenhouse gases? What if she is more likely to get struck by a speeding car than she is to benefit from a lifetime of physical activity? For an African American child who has no nearby park, safe sidewalks or fresh air, there’s got to be a better answer.
A constellation of factors in the physical, social, economic and service environment are referred to as the social determinants of health because they have an overwhelming influence on health, quality of life and death rates, as compared to medical care — which is only responsible for 10-15 percent of what determines how healthy we are and how long we live.
» Read more about: How SB 1 Can Help Reduce Health Inequities »
Here’s a surprisingly little secret: You know all those dates you see on food products—sell by, use by, best before? Those dates do not indicate the safety of your food, and generally speaking, they’re not regulated.
If this is news for you, you’re not alone. In fact, according to one industry study, 90 percent of Americans at least occasionally throw food away prematurely because they mistakenly interpret the date label to mean their food is unsafe; 25 percent do so every time. In the U.K., they’ve estimated about 20 percent of food wasted in households is due to confusion over expiration dates. If this same estimate were true here, it would mean the average household of four could be spending $275-450 on discarding food that is perfectly fine, just because they misinterpret the label date.
Today, in partnership with the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic,
» Read more about: Misleading Food Sell-By Dates: Waste Not, Toss Not! »
Many of us try to be diligent about putting our empty bottles and cans in the blue recycling bin, but what do we do with our apple peels and coffee grounds? Can our lunch leftovers impact the air we breathe and the local economy?
All too often, these food scraps end up in a landfill, where they decompose and emit dangerous levels of methane — a greenhouse gas considered 21 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Businesses and residents from the City of Los Angeles send approximately 1.2 million tons of food scraps and yard waste into landfills each year, equivalent to the weight of 600,000 automobiles. Such compostable “organic” material forms nearly a third of California’s landfilled waste.
Recycling instead of landfilling our organic materials only improves our environment, it creates jobs. The Tellus Institute calculated that recovering and recycling our organic materials creates nearly twice the number of jobs as when the same materials are disposed.
» Read more about: How Leftovers Will Let Us Breathe Easier and Create Jobs »
Rooftop solar has many benefits, like reducing the need for dirty natural gas plants that pollute our air. It is also a great tool for growing California’s clean energy economy. In fact, not only does it save individuals money on their utility bills, but it also creates much-needed jobs.
The solar industry has created approximately 43,000 jobs in California alone. That’s more jobs than Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas and Electric combined. When families decide to go solar and install solar panels on their roofs, they contribute to this incredible job growth. This means that solar families are also solar job creators.
The jobs are not the only way rooftop solar helps the economy. Solar saves consumers money. According to the Vote Solar Initiative, schools and other public agencies have saved $2.5 billion installing rooftop solar. The money saved by schools provides huge budget relief to cash-strapped schools and can be used to purchase new books,
In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 375, the first piece of legislation in any state that tied transportation choices to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The legislation, authored by Senator Darrell Steinberg, required that planning regions create transportation plans that would reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
As more and more regions adopt these plans, an obvious flaw is emerging. Plans are only as good as the money that exists to implement them. With funding scarce, many of these plans will likely gather dust.
Steinberg went back to work. His first piece of legislation to address this shortfall was vetoed by Governor Brown last year. Brown felt that the timing wasn’t right for legislation that gave municipalities the power to create agencies similar to the Community Redevelopment Agencies he had just ordered dismantled. That didn’t stop Steinberg from reintroducing similar legislation,
» Read more about: Will Jerry Brown OK Sustainable Development? »
A specter is haunting Detroit — the specter of the Koch Brothers’ toxic brand of unregulated corporatism, as embodied in a cloud bank of pollution that recently blackened the Motor City’s horizon. Abby Zimet, writing in Common Dreams, describes the event as captured by a
[m]ind-boggling video of a billowing, high-carbon, high-sulfur cloud from the mountain of petroleum coke – waste from Canadian tar sands shipped from Alberta to Detroit, and the dirtiest potential energy source ever – illegally stored by the Koch Brothers along the Detroit River. Produced by Marathon Refinery but owned by Koch Carbon, the pet-coke piles have for months been producing “fugitive dust” – i.e.: thick black crud – that blankets the homes of outraged residents and lawmakers; analysis shows the dust contains elevated levels of lead, sulfur, zinc and the likely carcinogenic vanadium.
As we noted here last year,
» Read more about: Koch Brothers’ Huge Coke Cloud Darkens Detroit »
Big Oil says we ought to be supporting fracking because it causes less air pollution than other forms of energy, such as coal or even conventional oil drilling. As is frequently the case in these fights over facts, the oil companies have it about half right – maybe less.
Fracking technology pumps a mix of water, chemicals and sand a mile or so into the earth’s crust to release natural gas captured between layers of rock that the usual methods of drilling couldn’t touch. It’s birthed a modern day gold rush as the petroleum companies hurry to be the first to drill the Barnett Shale in Texas or the Marcellus Shale that lies beneath parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland. Closer to home, there is the Monterey Shale formation in the old oil fields around Taft, west of Bakersfield.
Push below the surface of the big oil theme and we learn that while burning natural gas for fuel produces only about half the carbon emissions as coal,
» Read more about: Big Oil Has Big Plans for Our Environment »
This week the Partnership for Working Families released Transforming Trash in Urban America, a report that underscores the urgent need to reform the way America’s largest cities deal with their trash.
The report reviewed the waste management infrastructure of the top 37 metropolitan areas in the United States and found that environmentally unsound waste disposal processes create strain on local budgets, degrade a city’s quality of life and seriously accelerate climate change. Nearly half of the cities involved have recycling rates in the teens or lower— significantly below the national average of 34 percent.
Transforming Trash presents San Francisco, Seattle and San Jose as models for reform. These cities have created sustainable recycling infrastructure that has notably decreased the amount of trash sent to landfills, while creating good jobs and stimulating local economies.
According to the report, the ideal sustainable recycling system has the following five elements.
» Read more about: Transforming Trash Into Good Jobs and a Clean Environment »