RePower LA’s proposal “appears to be one of those rare public policy ideas that generates not only broad, but enthusiastic support from the electorate. Voters appreciate that it not only creates needed jobs, opportunities with union benefits, but it does so while cleaning our air, reducing electricity bills for 10,000 homes and businesses a year, and lowering electricity generating costs for generations
The Board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power took a huge step towards a greener, more efficient Los Angeles last Thursday. With a unanimous vote, the Board more than doubled LADWP’s investment in energy efficiency programs while also committing to sustaining that investment over the long term.
The Board set a goal of reducing energy consumption “at least 10%” with a soft target of 15% by 2020, pending the results of a new energy efficiency potential study. “These are significant increases and set LADWP on the path to be a leader in energy efficiency, allowing its customers to take advantage of this clean and cheap source of power,” NRDC’s Kristin Eberhard blogged the next day. “A robust energy efficiency budget can help create jobs and displace dirty coal in LADWP’s portfolio.” The vote came after over a year-and-a-half of organizing by a diverse coalition of environmentalists,
» Read more about: LADWP Board Votes to Dramatically Increase Energy Efficiency and Jobs Programs »
(The following post appeared yesterday on California Progress Report; a slightly shorter version was first posted on the Consumer Federation of California‘s Web site.)
By Richard Holober
Californians are exposed to dangerous levels of toxic chemicals in our homes, thanks to a 37 year old state furniture regulation. While the regulation never served its intended goal of reducing fires in our homes, its legacy of toxic harm lives on.
Click here to ask the Governor to take toxics out of our furniture.
In May 2012, a remarkable investigative series in the Chicago Tribune exposed decades of lies, coercion and influence peddling by flame retardant manufacturers. The report describes how a chemical industry front group paid a medical school professor to travel to Sacramento to testify on two separate occasions before the state legislature.
» Read more about: Getting the Poison Out of Our Furniture »
By Carl Franzen
(Note: Last January Donald Cohen wrote here of the conservative political animus against new, green lighting technologies – namely, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The following repost of a May 12 Talking Points Memo feature looks at the evolution of another alternative to wasteful incandescent lighting – illumination by light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Battle lines were drawn in Las Vegas, Nevada this week at the 23rd annual Lightfair International trade show, an exposition of the latest in artificial lighting technology.
Spurred in part by the controversial, misunderstood, national phase-out of energy inefficient incandescent bulbs that began in January, companies are racing to develop light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that meet the new energy standards, and yet will provide the same lighting quality that consumers are used to getting from the old, inefficient incandescents.
There they go again. The Heartland Institute, which The New York Times rather generously describes as a “libertarian organization,” recently felt compelled to yank a line of billboards comparing believers in climate change to mass murderers and dictators. “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” asked one billboard featuring a picture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. More boards had been planned for Chicago, in a run-up to the institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change, a kind of Coachella for climate-change deniers. Those ads showed photos of Charles Manson, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden.
Apparently even some of Heartland’s fellow climate-change deniers began feeling a little queasy over the campaign and so the Windy City-based group killed its plan. Not with any remorse, however. Institute president Joseph Bast released this statement:
“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters .
» Read more about: Climate-Change Denier Group Is Feeling the Heat »
First the Beverly Hills Unified School District ended its tradition of allowing B.H.-adjacent kids to attend that posh city’s schools. Now the local PTA is fighting tooth and French nail to keep subway trains from traveling under Beverly Hills High School via the proposed Westside Subway Extension. The subway has been planned to run through a nine-mile tunnel connecting the current Wilshire and Western terminus of the Purple Line to downtown Santa Monica.
The PTA, according to a Los Angeles Times piece, has released a scare video that predicts “a doomsday scenario” in which students could be incinerated in the event a train somehow ignites a plume of subterranean methane gas left over from the oil wells the school was built on. But if the school is sitting on such a potential box of dynamite, why isn’t it shut down immediately – with or without a subway?
» Read more about: WebHot: Beverly Hills Says, “Not Under My Back Yard!” »
I received no less than 25 emails celebrating the passage of the 2035 SCAG RTP within the past few weeks. This stands for the Southern California Association of Governments’ Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy. Environmentalists, low-income groups and housing groups all cheered the vast improvements to the way regional planning organizations look at future development. This new, more comprehensive view ideally would address the twin goals of creating more economically vibrant communities and improving our environment.
ClimatePlan, the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network and MOVE LA, among other groups, have praised the projected greenhouse gas, “vehicle miles traveled (VMT)” and traffic congestion reductions, as well as the forward-looking goals of increasing non-motorized transportation use, such as bicycles and walking.
Yet while there is much to take heart in, I started to ask myself: Could the SCAG plan have aimed even higher?
I salute the planners and community activists who brought a progressive vision and spent many long hours working on shaping the plan into what it is.
» Read more about: Could Transportation Plan Have Dreamt Bigger? »
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s preliminary budget will come before the Los Angeles City Council today. There’s lots there to consider, from hundreds of millions of dollars for rebuilding local power plants and renewable energy to hundreds of millions more to replace an aging distribution system.
Buried in the budget is a piece of good news that deserves some recognition. The LADWP’s $88 million energy efficiency budget is looking more respectable than it has in the past and more on par with other utilities. Last year, the Department spent $50 million. This year’s budget is not quite where it should be, but it’s moving in the right direction.
That is due in large part to a campaign led by RePower LA, a citywide coalition of community groups, environmentalists, small businesses and IBEW Local 18 committed to expanding energy efficiency investment in a way that leads to career-path jobs,
» Read more about: Community Activism Powers Energy Efficiency at LADWP »
Writer Patty Lovera has an illuminating – if alarming – takedown of Walmart’s frequent green boasting. Her Grist feature, “Top 10 Ways Walmart Is Failing on Sustainability,” points out that while “Walmart’s green PR machine has been running on overdrive lately,” the retail giant gets an F on its environmental and social report card in 10 critical categories.
Summarizing an analysis done by Food and Water Watch, Lovera notes, among other things, that Walmart falls flat by gobbling up previously undeveloped land for its big box stores, selling organic versions of processed products made by industrial food giants and spreading poverty by degrading the quality of life of neighborhoods where it locates.
Lovera also takes aim at Walmart’s recently published, 126-page Global Responsibility Report that ballyhoos the beneficial role Walmart plays on the environmental stage and in the lives of its employees and the communities it operates in.
» Read more about: WebHot: Walmart's Bad Green Report Card »
(Editor’s Note: This post, by Kathleen Peine, originally appeared at L.A. Progressive.)
There’s something buried in a new Pennsylvania law and it’s every bit as toxic as the chemicals used to unearth natural gas through that process called fracking. Lurking in that law is a form of enforced ignorance.
And as Will Rogers said, “When ignorance gets started, it knows no bounds.”
In this law there is a provision that essentially gags physicians when they want to tell their patients what particular chemicals they have been exposed to, should they become ill from exposure to fracking chemicals. The doctors will be required to sign confidentiality agreements in order to find out the components in their quest to treat stricken individuals. The law is advanced as a protection of proprietary secrets……as if we’re talking about New Coke here.
» Read more about: Pennsylvania Doctors on Fracking: Our Lips Are Sealed »
Last week I made up my first Twitter hashtag: #wonkygeekheaven. Which is exactly what the first Los Angeles Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference was for me. There was lots of talk about LAANE’s Don’t Waste LA campaign (which my company, Isidore Electronics Recycling, is a new partner of), passionate discussions with labor and environmental groups, analysis of the economic impact of climate change policy on cities and a rally against a big bad waste company.
Like I said, #wonkygeekheaven.
I never thought I would start an electronics recycling company. But while in my twenties I did a stint in (then) City Council President Eric Garcetti’s office, where I focused on public safety and gang intervention and prevention. There, I saw the same truth over and over: At-risk people and those exiting prison need jobs. I headed to graduate school to figure out how to make that happen,
» Read more about: My Quest for a Greener, Cleaner Tomorrow »
By Kate Sheppard
(This post originally appeared on Mother Jones .)
Climate Central has released a new in-depth report on the combined impacts of rising seas and storm surges. With rising water levels, more people and property are at risk—especially during storms, which force water farther inland. Here’s an excerpt from the executive summary:
Global warming has raised sea level about eight inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Scientists expect 20 to 80 more inches this century, a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky. This study makes mid-range projections of 1 to 8 inches by 2030, and 4 to 19 inches by 2050, depending upon location across the contiguous 48 states.
Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. For more than two-thirds of the locations analyzed (and for 85% of sites outside the Gulf of Mexico),
We drove north out of Santa Fe, through Espanola and past Abiquiu, the village where the artist Georgia O’Keefe lived, until we reached a narrow road in the high country. Then we drove until we came to a dirt and gravel road that led another 10 miles to a small cluster of houses and buildings named Ganado, the Spanish word for “cattle.” My wife, Susan, would live for a week at an encampment with a hundred other women, creating rituals and raising consciousness — while I headed back to Santa Fe with a stack of books.
But when I picked her up, she was not happy. The conference had been great, and the women amazing, but the noise had kept her mostly awake day and night. Just over the hillock someone was digging for natural gas, and by day the trucks rolled through and the drilling machines whined, and by night the pumps roared and the pipes rattled.
Since when did one’s mode of transportation become about politics? Who ever thought that riding one’s bike to the grocery store, taking the bus to work or driving to run errands could be a sign of one’s political stripes?
In some cities, such as New York and San Francisco, riding the train defines the experience of everyone living there. Entire movies, books and blogs have documented the romance and day-to-day life of riding public transit and navigating busy sidewalks. Can you even imagine what a New York free of subways, buses and pedestrians would look like? Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, you’re on the train.
Just ask Mitt.
Mitt Romney is among a vocal set of Republicans who have decided that certain forms of transportation are more democratic than others; he subscribes to the belief that roads are a given right of Americans, but that public transit is not.
» Read more about: Highway Robbery: Mitt Romney’s War on Mass Transit »
By Ashley McCormack
One of the major focuses of this presidential election year is the economy and the ways we can create jobs. President Obama’s State of the Union address and the Republican debates make it clear that everyone has an opinion about how to put Americans back to work. It’s equally evident that a good jobs plan must build a sustainable American economy – from an environmental standpoint as well as one that will benefit the next generation, and employ people in the kind of jobs that will keep America competitive in the global economy.
Each year, the BlueGreen Alliance hosts Good Jobs, Green Jobs, a national conference bringing together labor, environmental, business and elected leaders to discuss how we can build an economy that creates precisely such jobs. In this pivotal year, instead of hosting one national conference, the BlueGreen Alliance will hold Good Jobs,
February 13 was a big day for those who want Los Angeles to lead the way in greening our cities. After a contentious all-day hearing, the L.A. City Board of Public Works unanimously approved the Bureau of Sanitation’s recommendation to transform trash collection from businesses and large apartment buildings.
Under the new system, which must still be approved by the City Council, haulers will operate under an exclusive franchise system with environmental standards and accountability. This means, finally, that our city will know who is picking up trash where, when and how — and that only responsible haulers, committed to playing by the rules, will be picking up and processing our trash.
One of the themes heard repeatedly during public testimony at last week’s board hearing was that an exclusive system is going to raise costs. And there was a magic number to go along with the cry: 33 percent!
» Read more about: Junk Math: The Waste Industry’s Numbers Don’t Add Up »
(Note: This post first appeared on Grist.com.)
By Christopher Mims
Maybe you’ve heard that we’re now using more trees for toilet paper than for newsprint. (Not least because the newspaper industry is even more in the toilet than toilet paper.) But did you know that because of Americans’ demand for super-soft TP for our bungholes, 98 percent of the pulp used to make the stuff comes from virgin wood?
“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution,” Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council, told the Guardian.
More toilet paper used to be made out of recycled office paper,
» Read more about: Let’s Ban Toilet Paper, Some Enviros Say »
George Garrigues/Wikimedia
The emergence of Los Angeles as one of the world’s great cities, despite its location in a resource-stressed desert basin, has always been the surprise outcome of an unnatural act. L.A.’s stunning growth has been fed by a vast network of electric transmission wires that have, for 100 years, drawn in power from around the West to fuel the always-enlarging economic engines of the city.
This form of urban nourishment has been orchestrated by the city-owned Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which has historically provided L.A. with extremely reliable power at an unusually low price. But now, like utilities around the nation, the DWP is facing serious challenges.
First, the DWP will have to provide more and more power to the city. The population of Los Angeles is going to keep expanding, and with technological innovations like electric vehicles, the need for power will only increase.
» Read more about: DWP’s Power Struggle and the Future of LA »