LA Weekly

Here's a deal: For around $20,000-$25,000, the people at Left Coast Conversions will sell you a modular kit -- controller, batteries and motor -- to turn your Mazda Miata, Ford Focus or PT Cruiser into a fully functional electric car. For a little bit more, they will do it for you in three days. They will also convert other type of car, but it may take as long as a week and the price depends on the make and model of the car (they're currently working on a '76 Oldsmobile).

The cars generallly have a range of about 100 miles, and plug in to charging stations installed at 220V outlets.

Here's my alternative=energy transportation dream: Short-range EV plugged into a solar charging station; long-range diesel running biofuel for road trips. First I gotta come up with the $20,000, though (although as demand increases, says Left Coast founder Gadget, the price will come down).

Next year maybe they'll put you in one that can race.

Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The California Air Resources Board today approved a plan to reduce emissions at the ports. If it lives up to its designs, the Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce premature deaths caused by port pollution from the current 2,400 per year to 800 per year by 2020. That's good, I suppose. But I was there at the Long Beach Convention Center when this happened, and I can attest that not everyone was happy about it. Even the people who were sort of okay about it weren't happy about it.

Andrea Hricko of USC's Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center put it this way (and I paraphrase): If an avian flu epidemic were claiming 2,400 lives in the state each year, and some scientists proposed reducing that by 800 by 2020, would that be acceptable?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"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.

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

. . . 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.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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 http://climatechange.ca.gov/climate_action_team/reports/index.html">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.

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)