LA Weekly

Studies have shown that methamphetamine is hard on the brain. You do it once, twice -- soon, you can't remember where you were when you did it, or who you were with; you can't even remember where you got the stuff. For some people it's even worse -- for some people, even thinking about methamphetamine wipes the memory card clean. For them, just planning a whole day devoted to the awareness of the meth scourge makes it impossible to recall the long stretches of time before and after.

From this morning's interrogation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican from Alabama, lest you think this is a partisan issue):

Sessions: [Y]ou said I don't recall being involved in deliberations regarding whether a United States Attorney should or should not be asked to resign . . . Mr. Sampson had testified that there was a meeting where this was discussed in some detail and that you were present. Do you recall that meeting and where it took place?

Gonzales: Senator, I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting. My schedule shows that meeting for nine o'clock on November 27, but I have no recollection of that meeting....

Sessions: Well, do you recall who Mr. Sampson said was present along with you?

Gonzales: Senator, I recall looking at the documentation on the calendar who would be there. . . . I have no memory of this, but I think the calendar shows that the invitees were the deputy attorney general, the principal associate attorney general Mr. Will Moschella, Kyle Sampson chief of staff, Mike Battle the executive director of executive office of the attorney general, Monica Goodling and myself.
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Sessions: Mr. Sampson seemed to indicate that he understood it was a momentous decision and there would probably be political backlash. . . . You don't recall any of that?

Gonzales: Believe me, I have searched my mind for what I remember about this meeting... At some point Mr. Sampson presented to me the recommendations. At some point I understood what the implementation plan was. But I don't recall the contents of this meeting, Senator.

Sessions: I'm worried about it. Mr. Battle who was there thought you were there, and he thought you were there most of the time. Do you dispute Mr. Battle?

Gonzales: Sometimes people's recollections are different. I have no reason to doubt Mr. Battle's testimony.

Sessions: I have concerns about your recollection, really. It was not that long ago, it was an important issue, and that's troubling to me, I gotta tell you . . .

Gonzales: I went back and looked at my calendar for that week, I traveled to Mexico for the inauguration of the new president. We had National Meth Awareness Day . . . there were a lot of other weighty issues and matters that we were dealing with that week.

Yeah, that's right. National Meth Awareness Day, November 30 -- three days after the meeting about which Gonzales has searched his memory and come up empty. Firing U.S. Attorneys for not performing the president's frog march, that's all in a forgettable day's work. But National Meth Awareness Day? That's big. Memorable, even.

Did you know that " A fairly common hallucination experienced by meth users is the so-called crank bug"? I didn't. That's what I got from the page Gonzales and crew evidently worked so hard on that he totally forgot he'd participated in a detailed meeting about which U.S. Attorneys would be losing their jobs.

I know, it's Earth Day and all. But I thought that maybe what I heard this morning explains why the attorney general allowed the Justice Department's former top environmental prosecutor to sign soggy Superfund cleanup deals with ConocoPhillips after she's just bought a million-dollar home with the company's top lobbyist; why he targeted plain-old saboteurs as "terrorists" on the grounds that they were acting in the name of the environment; and why federal prosecutions of environmental crimes have fallen to a new all-time low. The AG had meth on the brain.

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Do you think we'd put in place some hard, rigorous standards for food safety?

Then why don't we do the same for air pollution?

The Natural Resources Defense Council's John Walke in Washington D.C. slipped NPR's Elizabeth Shogren a report proving that the EPA's own experts agree: By adopting a looser standard for soot (aka particulate matter), the Environmental Protection Agency has doomed 5,000 to 10,000 people to die early from respiratory illness.

One, I believe, died from E. Coli-tainted spinach, and less than 200 got sick.
I'm not saying we should tolerate a dangerous food supply, or fail to address the real source of E. Coli in spinach, which was probably not Natural Selection Foods' processing facility ("The detective trail," writes New York Times' columnist Nina Planck, "ultimately leads back to a seemingly unrelated food industry — beef and dairy cattle.") But our outrage about air pollution is frequently tempered by what seems to us like an indirect connection between the poison and the victim. Unless people start dying in the streets the way they did in London in 1952, we don't realize that they're dying at all.

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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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Today is the day the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, after a three-year hiatus, once again begins offering rebates to customers who install photovoltaic -- that is, solar -- electrical system. The incentive program provides a $.14/kWh rebate for solar power installations that are Underwriter’s Laboratories (UL)-listed, and approved and listed by the California Energy Commission. You get two cents more per kilowatt hour if your panels were made in Los Angeles. More to come.

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Michael Kinsley once said that the problem with journalism today is that reporters have to interview an expert just to say 2+2=4. And then, for balance, they have to interview another "expert" who will claim that 2+2=5.

I was reminded of that yesterday when Reuters released this elephant-in-the-room story, "Climate Change Behind Summer Heat Waves?" Here's an excerpt:

“As ever, you cannot say any one weather event is caused by global warming,” said Asher Timms of Britain’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research. “But globally, it seems that there’s quite a shift in our weather patterns.”

Skeptics of the global warming theory, which predicts droughts and floods this century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, say the media play up hot summer days for dramatic effect.

Bill O’Keefe, a board member of Washington think tank the George C. Marshall Institute and a consultant to the oil industry, said the record heat could be seen as part of a natural cycle of highs and lows.

Now, as I sit in the 100-degree heat waiting for my new solar-powered swamp cooler to arrive, I ask you this:

Who gives a rat's ass what Bill O'Keefe thinks?! Bill O'Keefe is not a scientist! Bill O'Keefe's last job was shilling for the American Petroleum Institute! I know the article says he works for the oil industry -- and good for them -- but the average reader (i.e., Peggy "Blame the Scientists" Noonan) will take these remarks as evenly weighted and conclude there is not yet a, you know, consensus about climate change." She may not even get to the pair of sentences that comes a few lines later:

U.S. space agency NASA says 2005 was the warmest globally in more than a century and that the preceding three years were also the warmest since the 1890s. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center said the first half of 2006 were the warmest six months since records began in 1895.

Add to this Newsweek's despicable "Green Issue" portrait of George Bush, so riddled with outright lies I can't even start: Okay -- he did not propose the "first-ever cut in mercury emissions from power plants"; the Clinton administration's "Maximum Achievable Control Technology," had it remained in place, would have reduced power-plant mercury emissions by an estimated 92 percent by 2007; Bush's "cap-and-trade" plan aimed at mercury would reduce mercury emissions from a current 48 tons per year to 34 tons by 2018. The plan was shredded by everyone from Sen. Jim Jeffords to Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe. That Newsweek, which used to be a decent magazine under the late Maynard Parker, would suggest otherwise is unconscionable.

And after all that, you can hardly blame Peggy for her confusion. I mean, really.

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Wednesday night I took a spin in the Tesla Roadster, the new high-end sportsmobile created by a San Carlos, California-based team in collaboration with the Lotus people in the UK. The Roadster runs on 6,831 lithium-ion laptop batteries, travels 250 miles on a three-hours charge, and looks beautiful -- none of that space-age, self-consciously weird design you see in concept cars, just efficient, fluid lines and functional equipment (like an iPod dock).

While I was waiting in line, Who Killed the Electric Car? director Chris Paine walked up with a committed buyer (whose name I know, but didn't ask to use, so I'll keep it to myself.) Paine was wearing a white t-shirt with black lettering advertising the title of his film, and one of the Tesla guys stopped him:

"You have to change the title of your movie," he said. "It should be, 'Who THOUGHT They Killed The Electric Car?'"

Indeed. I took the opportunity to plug my feature from last week, on Reverend Gadget and "Jolly" Roger Wilson's Left Coast Conversions. Electric cars are popping out all over.

And that's great. But I have a question.

At yesterday's California Air Resources Board meeting, representatives from both the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles reiterated their committments to "cold-ironing," or "Alternative Maritime Power" (AMP), or plugging big ships into electrical outlets while parked in the harbor.

And the temperature in Los Angeles has topped or neared 100 degrees every day for the last week. Every day I've been watching midday power usage soar up close to the state's 50,000 megawatt capactiy (get your own Realtime California Independent System Operator power monitoring widget here). The state has regularly been pushing toward 47,000 megawatt record-breaking consumption.
So, to be completely harsh and realistic about all these changes, I must ask: Where's all that electricity going to come from?

Answers, please.

Also, something a little unusual happened during my test ride, which I'll divulge in the piece that runs in the actual paper next week. All told, though, I liked the car a lot. I mean, who wouldn't? I have been experimenting on city roads to see if I can get my biodiesel Bug to accelerate with any force at all. It's can't, but it's actually kind of thrilling.

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Technical difficulties prevented me from blogging earlier about the Southern California fires in the high desert near the mountains, but all that should be cleared up -- we've moved to a new system.

The best way to keep track of the two still active fires, which are either a few hundred feet apart or one big 60,000-acre fire by now, depending on who you ask, is the Rim of the World incident report, a tradition that began with the Old Fire in 2003. You'll find good links and up-to-the-minute news here, as well as actual dispatches from the people fighting the fire.

The incident updates are a little less interesting now that the fire has "laid down," as they say, but it'll be useful if stirs up again -- as it might; it's plenty hot out there. When I drove out to check out the fire in the Morongo Valley yesterday afternoon, the (extremely accurate) thermometer in my car flipped over to 112 at the Riverside County line and Highway 62.

Last night I went to the Yucca Valley Community Meeting, where firefighters were given standing ovations three times. For the most part it was a friendly and calm meeting, but a few people were mad, especially the people from the Pipes Canyon area above Yucca Valley, where the fire sped through almost without warning. One woman stood up to describe running for her life, with no advance notice from the radio or local authorities.

But the fire burned 22,000 acres in five hours, said one of the incident command guys at the meeting. "We had no idea it would burn so much so fast," he said.

No human lives were lost, but Yucca Valley Animal Control officer Kim Casey claimed last night claimed that there had been quite a few animal casualties.

John Miller of the U.S. Forest Service told me after the meeting that the unusually hot, fast fire in high desert vegetation was fueled by unusually tall grasses. "There wasn't enough wind to blow the seeds away," he said, and then there was that mid-March rain and snow. He didn't tell me that pollution and changes in climate have altered that high desert ecosystem, but that may also be true. (Scroll down to "Impacts of Anthropogenic N Deposition on Weed Invasion, Biodiversity and Fire Cycles at Joshua Tree National Park.")

The Desert Sun also has excellent coverage (and some amazing photos) here. More as the story unfolds.

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"USAQ is a daily diary of air quality in the U.S. using information from NASA satellites, ground-based lidar, EPA monitoring networks, and other monitors. Interpretation and analysis is provided by the staff of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Atmospheric Lidar Group."

Light haze in the southeast, ashes in the northwest; otherwise, The Smog Blog says you can breathe deep today.

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