September 2006 Archives
I'm sorry to those who posted comments here before I figured out we'd switched to all moderated comments. I just discovered the little backlog this morning. Apologies especially to G.R.L. and Eric McErlain, whose comments on the nuclear issue were important and should have been addressed. They are now.
I appreciate the feedback; it helps me figure out what I think. Or what I think I think.
City Hippy, I love your blog, and I thought I'd already linked to you. But thanks for visiting, and I've blogrolled you now.
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It's true that Mr. Schwarzenegger signed the Million Solar Roofs bill. And today his campaign has also sent out an email dispatch taking challenger Phil Angelides to task for "running from his environmental record."
But he also showed today that when it comes to the less sexy and flashy environmental decisions -- you know, like protecting people from the things that actually kill them, even it costs businesses a trivial amount of cash -- he's the girliest man of all.
California State Senator Alan Lowenthal's container fee bill would have imposed a $30 fee per 20-foot container moving through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It would have generated $500 million annually to be split three ways: To the state air board for cleaning up the polluted air that fells 2,400 port-adjacent residents every year; to the ports themselves for better security; and to the California Transportation Commission to improve rail service.
The bill, SB 927, was just the latest incarnation of a law everybody but the shipping industry itself believes makes sense: It would have made the shippers themselves pay for the environmental and infrastructural consequences of their bustling trade with Asia.
Today, however, the governor vetoed that bill. "It is very important that any measure that increases fees that impact exporters not have the unintended consequence of negatively impacting the sale and delivery of goods grown and manufactured in California," he wrote.
Never mind that a midsummer survey by the Public Policy Institute showed that nearly three-quarters of Californians believed in tougher pollution rules for shippers even it meant it would cost those businesses more. Never mind that an August study by the Coalition for Clean Air and the Natural Resources Defense Council showed that the container fee would "have very little effect on ship diversion from those ports." Schwarzenegger wasn't listening to the public policy experts, environmentalists or even California residents. He was listening to the international shipping lines who move $260 billion in goods every year through Southern California's dirty ports.
Oh, and by the way, that rumor you heard about Schwarzenegger giving up his Hummers is just that: He's keeping 'em. Not everything Drudge links to is true.
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Environmental Action today kicked off a campaign to get the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard doubled. The CAFE standard just stipulates that the fuel economy of an automakers entire fleet must average out to a certain number (it's been stuck in the 20s since the '80s). You can put four models of SUVs on the market that get 10 miles per gallon, for instance, as along as you have equal numbers of hybrids getting, say, 35 miles per gallon. (See my article from last fall, "Better Mileage on Ice: Why refrigerators are more efficient than cars.")
The auto industry has fought CAFE standards hard, complaining that it's just too expensive to made fuel-efficient cars. But it's one of the reasons Detroit is suffering while Japan is not: U.S. fuel-efficiency standards are half what they are in Japan. Even China has us beat.
So, says Dan Stafford of EA, "Our first step in the campaign is to offer the big 3 auto makers that we'll pay the difference of the cost of doubling the mileage standard." In other words, EA wants consumers to sign a pledge saying they'll pay the difference in price for more fuel efficient cars (around $2,000).
The only quibble I have here is: Have we proved that producing fuel-efficient cars costs auto companies more than making guzzlers? A University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute says something to the contrary:
Detroit automakers, who have long depended on the least fuel efficient vehicles to provide most of their profits (and some of who have argued that fuel economy did not matter very much to their customers) are seeing their sales and profits evaporate, as new vehicle buyers switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
In fact, Congress would likely be doing automakers a favor by forcing their fuel economy up. They would level the global car market playing field, and re-invigorate the industry, as well as reduce carbon dioxide emissions and wean us all off oil. I can't see a downside worth paying $2,000 extra for. But if that's what it takes, I'm for it.
Check out EA's "Oil Counter," too.
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The Union of Concerned Scientists has singled out two California nuclear reactors, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Unit 1 in Orange County and the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant up near Sacramento, as examples of nuclear facilities that underwent long shutdown periods thanks to lax procedures at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Even if you're for this alleged nuclear energy renaissance, you have to accept that lingering issues have to be addressed if the industry is going to move forward, and chief among them is the NRC's ineffectiveness.
Nearly half the agency's employees don't feel comfortable whistleblowing, and several mishaps in the industry's history can be traced back to NRC negligence (the most obvious is the leak in the reactor head that nearly blew up at the Davis Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio). The agency has been pelted with lawsuits by watchdogs, environmentalists and consumer groups, alleging that it hasn't done enough to secure the nation's plants against terrorist attacks and that it "fast-tracked" relicensing procedures.
Back in 2003, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) concluded that the NRC regularly underplayed security lapses at nuke plants; three years earlier, it flat out accused the NRC of having people inside its ranks who essentially work as lobbyists against nuclear power plant safety. So, maybe it is a problem after all that the agency gets its funding from fees from the nuclear industry itself?
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Got back with a wretched sore throat last week from Burning Man, where I lived a pretty upstanding life. But not a green one, by any stretch: I rented an SUV to get to the event, spent $150 each way on gas, used ice by the bagfull to chill our nightly bottle of Proseco and generally squandered paper (towels), plastic (water bottles) and any other resources I could get my hands one (zip ties, shower water, electricity generated with petro-diesel fuel).
And I'm still not as bad as some people I know, who put up domes of toxic PVC pipe and dump their graywater on the Playa.
In past years, I've camped in the Alternative Energy Zone, and learned a lot from those people, including Roger, the AEZ's mayor, about minimizing consumption on the Playa. I put up solar panels, I made scooters run on solar power, I evaporated every drop of graywater. In the AEZ, people were watching.
But this year, in the magical and luxurious Red Nose District, I took showers in water heated with propane and ran my kitchen blender off a diesel generator. When I tried to spread the AEZ gospel of biodiesel and solar power alternatives in advance of the event, I got nowhere. No interest. And it got me thinking: Can Burning Man ever be green?
Evidently the Burning Man organization thinks it can. This year they announced next year's theme on the weekend of the burn -- four or five months earlier than usual: It's "The Green Man.":
Our theme concerns humanity's relationship to nature. Do we, as conscious beings, exist outside of nature's sway, or does its force impel us and inform the central root of who and what we are?
There's also a project by Burners Without Borders called "Cooling Man," where they're trying to offset the events carbon emissions by riding bikes and planting trees, but I'm not as impressed with it as I'd like to be. At their Web site, I calculated my greenhouse gas emissions (0.05 tons), then learned from the site that one tree absorbs 0.02 tons of GHGs. So does that mean I can counterbalance my incredibly dirty trip to Black Rock City by planting two trees in Los Angeles? What about the water required to nurture those trees, the maintenance they'll need to keep them healthy and pruned, the cost in resources of shipping that tree to the nursery, and my effort to bring it home? I'm not seeing it.
Jolly Roger had another idea: Why not create a Black Rock Alternative Energy Council, just as there's a Black Rock Arts Council to subsidize art BMorg likes?
Says Roger in an email to the Greening Man list:
[The Black Rock AEC] would fund projects that provide or show how to:
A. use less energy (for lighting or sound or evap)
B. Use alternative methods to power lighting or sound (or evap)
C. refrigeration
D. Evaporation system designs
E. motive power (art cars that are not gas/diesel)
F. how-tos (solar/wind/pedal)
G. classes on the playa
H. creation of sustainable stuff workshops
I. power for art
When Roger granted me permission to publish that list, he also warned me against any more proselytizing for alternative energy in other camps on the Playa:
Gospel is most often run away from really fast (remember when the adventists appear at your door?). That tends to be ignored on-playa. I tend toward: Hey,
try this cool thing, it's not that hard. And look how much fun it is. (and I keep a secret of
how educational and energy-saving it is). And try warm mild lemon tea with honey for your throat.