Bernard Burns

Updated at the bottom: The council approved the watered-down version of the ban. First posted at 6:04 a.m.

The L.A. City Council almost brought home an unprecedented "double ban" on paper and plastic bags at your local market.

But last-minute lobbying pressure might have caused the body to back down. Now it's looking at a plastic-only ban that would phase out bags in six months to a year. A vote is expected this morning.

Oh well. Nice try:

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o5com

The L.A. City Council this week could make ours the biggest city in America to not only ban plastic bags at markets, but also prohibit paper bags.

The body finally takes up the historic proposal on Wednesday.

And environmentalists and supporters of Heal the Bay will be there:

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Tessa Stuart

Tuesday's event at Kenneth Hahn Soccer Fields, adjacent to the Inglewood Oil Field.

Conversations about fracking, the controversial technique for natural gas extraction (alternately known as "that thing that turns your tap water flammable") are typically confined to Pennsylvania, where the critically acclaimed documentary Gasland was set, or the state of New York, currently debating whether or not it will allow fracking after a four-year hiatus for environmental review.

Don't feel left out, Angelenos, we've got fracking here too! And it might even be more dangerous than the kind that has allegedly poisoned drinking water and polluted the air in the Midwest and on the East Coast -- because injecting a high-pressure mixture of chemicals into the Earth to create fissures that release natural gas could have the effect of triggering a massive earthquake here in Southern California.

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Stephanie Yee /FOLAR

Don't ask.

The Los Angeles "River" is sort of a joke in this town: It looks more like a long ugly concrete gutter than anything an egret or magical swamp fairy would call home.

Maybe that explains why we treat it like our own personal trash chute!

Beginning a couple decades ago, a group called Friends of the Los Angeles River have been trying their best to undo the damage turn around our ugly habits...

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Eco-Interns

By Andra Lim

Four billboards featuring images high school students snapped with cellphones will go up at the north side of Los Angeles State Historic Park tomorrow.

As part of an eco-internship, 20 local students worked with UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) -- an organization that brings together technology and art -- to take pictures of the park and transform them using software.

Here's what the final product looks like:

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EPA

There used to be a combination Arco gas station and AM/PM market at Rosecrans and Alameda in Compton -- a smoggy little spot beneath the train-track overpass.

During the L.A. Riots, however, 20 years ago to the month...

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o5com

While other cities have famously banned plastic bags from your favorite Ralphs, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Markets, L.A. city leaders have, as usual, been sitting back, twiddling their thumbs, and considering the fine language "in committee."

City Hall's motion to ban such bags has been sitting around since September of last year (PDF) just waiting for the City Council to ask it to dance.

Well, the time may have come. And when L.A. gets off its ass, it goes big:

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Jacob Botter

Rain and mist that fell in Los Angeles last weekend was five times as radioactive as normal, environmental journalist and LA Weekly contributor Michael Collins reported on his website this week.

Collins tests samples with his own equipment and says that, on Saturday, he measured the highest proportion of radioactivity in the local environment since he began monitoring the local fallout from the Japanese Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March of 2011:

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Hillel Aron

Tim Leiweke, ready to release the EIR on building Farmers Field.

By Hillel Aron
Some call AEG's Tim Leiweke Los Angeles' most powerful man. But hours before today's release of a 10,000-page Environmental Impact Report for Farmers Field NFL stadium, Leiweke was stressed. Jacket off, slumped in a chair, drinking a Coke, he didn't seem like president of a firm with the biggest footprint downtown, maybe even citywide.

"There's a lot of people shooting at us," Leiweke says. "We still have a lot of controversy about, Can we do it? Is this the right place? Is this the right vision? Do we even want an NFL team?" He was doubtlessly referring to a Yahoo! Sports story the other day that called the AEG stadium deal "dead in the eyes of many involved."

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5 Gyres

There are conflicting forecasts for the post-tsunami trash flow headed our way after Japan's catastrophic earthquake more than a year ago.

Some scientists say it will all have been dispersed by the time it reaches our shores, and we'll barely even notice it among our usual flow of sea junk.

L.A. environmental researcher Marcus Eriksen begs to differ, and he's setting out on a cross-Pacific voyage, on a sailboat, to prove that the debris is out there, and that it's headed our way.

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Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas

Despite the efforts of plastic-bag manufacturer Hilex-Poly, a state Superior Court judge ruled last week that L.A. County's new plastic-bag ban is indeed constitutional.

But the plaintiff isn't giving up so easily. "We always knew this wasn't going to get resolved at the lower court level," says lead attorney Jim Parrinello. Next stop: California appeals court.

The debate revolves around the 10-cent fee that shoppers are now required to pay for a paper bag. (Unless they bring along a sturdy reusable bag of their own.)

Opponents to the ban are trying to claim...

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American Apparel

Bonus: 360-degree tan.

For all the PR energy that goes into pushing the solar revolution, Los Angeles homeowners remain skeptical about installing their own set of panels. (Our city of 4 million only has about 4,000 solar-powered homes.)

Maybe all those Big Green promo teams should have taken a tip or two from controversial American Apparel CEO Dov Charney. This guy knows better than the high-school volleyball coach at the corner carwash that sudsy young girls in bikinis can sell just about anything.

Case in point:

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imagebysp

Pull back, David Geffen, pull back! Whoever thought it was a good idea to build houses on the edge of the crashing surf in Malibu wasn't thinking long-term. (He was thinking hot tubs and bikinis, obviously. Or, in Geffen's case, infinity pools and man-thongs).

A new report from Climate Central says Southern California can expect the sea to rise 4 to 5 feet in the next 18 years. That's before your beach pad will be paid off. That's soon.

And while you might not think 4 feet sounds like much ...

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anthony_goto

Surfers call getting covered by a wave and riding inside its tube "getting shacked."

That could have a whole new meaning is some of the debris from last year's disastrous tsunami in Japan -- houses, cars, boats and all -- hits our shores.

Near the eve of the one-year anniversary of the disaster, the environmental group Heal the Bay has the 411 about possible debris hitting our shores. The good news, according a statement from the group?

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@NewtGingrich

The jobless rate is down. People are starting to spend money again. Some of Wall Street's biggest stocks, like Apple, are trading at record highs. Damn, this Great Recession might have just turned a corner for the better.

Finally.

Wait a minute. Did you say $5.59-a-gallon gas? Right here in L.A?

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Mmm. Smoggy.

Not only is there a correlation between smog-enveloped L.A. freeways and autistic babies, and a possible cause-and-effect between air pollution and death for us Southern Californians, but now researchers say dirty air might also trigger ... brain damage?

Awesome.

Another reason to love the L.A. life.

A new research paper published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine says ...

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UCLA

Yang Yang has a PhD in badass.

This is the handiest thing to come out of UCLA since those stretchy, glowing devices that can "move with the body." (Aka, a raver's dreamwear.)

Now, UCLA is expanding its stretch-nology into the Big Green industry.

A new method of collecting the sun's energy and using it to power man's devices is being perfected by Yang Yang, a researcher with the university's School of Engineering. Just yesterday, Yang announced...

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NixBC

The Sierra Nevada range.

If global warming is a serious problem making our summers hotter and our water sources drier, we'd certainly have felt it in California in the last 130 years, right?

But a new study that looks at the Sierra Mountains' snowpack and other statewide precipitation in that span concludes that "over time snowfall in California is neither increasing nor decreasing."

We'll drink to that.

Well, not so fast:

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The ouster of Occupy L.A. left City Hall Park with dirt where once there was turf. And when ideas started coming in about what should be done to restore the landscape that adorns the symbolic center of the city, the range of opinions was something akin to those within Occupy L.A.: widely varied, with a generally progressive bent.

In gardening terms, "progressive" means less grass and more drought-tolerant and native plants. The fear, however, was that the city, bureaucratic and broke, would blow the opportunity to reboot the garden and just go with the least expensive and most traditional option: planting another flat, green sprawl. After all, grass is the cheapest to install and the easiest to maintain.

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CBS LA

The dark side of green living.

Thank you, CBS LA, for getting to the bottom of this one.

Never has the brave new world of eco-friendly consumerism reached a conundrum so ridiculous:

Heather Patron, a resident of notoriously crunchy Studio City, tells the station that her Prius is melting in the scorching-hot sunbeams that bounce off her neighbor's energy-efficient windows. So CBS investigators whip out their trusty thermometers...

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