Opinion

February 1, 2023

Postcard from California: The Mojave Desert should not be a solar sacrifice zone

The Mojave Desert is a national treasure: a crucial habitat for thousands of indicator species, including the bighorn sheep and desert tortoises that are supposed to be protected under federal law, and the fantastical Joshua tree, found almost nowhere else on earth. In Southern California, the Mojave encompasses two iconic national parks and the country’s largest national preserve.

In recent years, newcomers fleeing Los Angeles have disrupted the Mojave, crowding the parks and special places, trampling fragile landscapes, fueling exurban sprawl, and displacing longtime residents. And now some who cherish the desert fear it is being sacrificed to the urgency of the climate crisis.

Throughout the Mojave, which reaches into Nevada, Arizona and Utah, construction of “utility-scale” solar power plants is booming.

These solar “farms,” as their developers call them, are arrays of photovoltaic panels that can cover thousands of acres and generate enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Most of the power is sold to big utilities.

In the California part of the Mojave alone, at least 50 solar plants have been built, approved or proposed. Some are on private, state or tribal lands; others are on or near federal lands earmarked to preserve biodiversity, open space or cultural heritage.

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January 4, 2023

Postcard from California: Big Oil’s campaign to kill drilling ban near homes and schools

By Bill Walker

In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a landmark bill banning new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet – about two-thirds of a mile – of homes, schools, day care centers, healthcare facilities, parks, and businesses open to the public. The measure also banned “reworking” old, unproductive wells lying within the buffer zones.

It was a huge win for environmental justice advocates, capping a decade-long campaign to protect Californians from the well-documented health risks of living near drill rigs, including premature births, heart disease and asthma. More than 7 million Californians – disproportionately lower-income people of color – live within a mile of active oil or gas wells.

Newsom signed the bill, SB 1137, on a Friday. The ink had hardly dried when, the following Monday, the oil and gas industry launched a petition drive to throw out the new law.

Under California’s referendum and initiative process, if enough registered and verified voters sign a petition to overturn a law, it goes on the ballot in the next general election. But even before voters get a chance to decide, the law is suspended until the election. Once hailed as a progressive tool of grassroots democracy, the initiative process is increasingly used by special interests to kill laws they don’t like.

Two weeks before Christmas, the California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA) announced it had gathered almost a million signatures on a petition to block the law, which was supposed to take effect this month. If roughly two-thirds are certified by county and state election officials, the buffer zones provided for by SB 1137 can’t take effect until after November 2024.

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December 9, 2022

Postcard from California: Food waste law fights hunger and climate change

By Bill Walker

California produces far more food than any other US state, but we throw a lot of it away. Meanwhile, more than one in five Californians don’t always know where their next meal is coming from. Food insecurity is higher among Black and Latino households, and inflation is making the problem worse.

Now the state is aiming to relieve hunger by reducing food waste – and at the same time, help to address climate change.

A state law that was passed in 2016 but took effect this year, requires businesses and facilities that sell or serve food to donate edible food they would otherwise throw out to local food banks. Grocery stores, wholesalers and distributors had to start donating earlier this year. Restaurants, hotels, schools, hospitals, state office cafeterias and event venues must comply by January 2024.

According to the state agency CalRecycle, Californians send more than 11 billion pounds of food to landfills every year. Nationally, about 80 billion pounds of wasted food goes to the dump yearly, making food the single largest constituent of municipal landfills.

Food rescue
While not all discarded food is fit to eat, the newly implemented law – SB 1383 – requires that by 2025 California will recover 20% of wasted food to feed people in need. Washington State has the same goal, but by mandating fines for non-compliance, California’s is the strongest “food rescue” measure in the country.

Rescuing edible food is only one front in the war on food waste.

November 18, 2022

Postcard from California: Regulators bowing to scheme to cripple rooftop solar

Once again, California is poised to sabotage its own climate goals.

After almost a year of heated public debate, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has unveiled its latest proposal for changes to the state’s rooftop solar program. The so-called reforms could cripple what is by far the most successful solar initiative in the U.S.

More than 1.5 million California households, schools and small businesses have installed solar panels. For 2019, the latest estimate available, the state said rooftop solar kept 6 million metric tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – equal to taking 1.3 million cars off the road. That’s a big boost to the state’s goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045.

But California’s “Big Three” utilities – Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. – hate rooftop solar.

Under a program known as net metering, solar customers are freed from having to buy electricity from the utilities, whose rates are some of the highest in the country. Instead, solar panel owners generate much of their own power. If they generate more than they draw from the utility-owned grid, the excess flows back into the system, and the utilities must pay them for it.

Last year the Big Three pushed the PUC to deeply slash the rebates to solar customers and tack on a steep monthly surcharge just for connecting to the grid. In February, the PUC bowed to the lobbying and issued a proposal that could have slowed rooftop solar growth by half or more.

Public outcry forced the PUC to pull the first proposal back for revision. A new proposal in May still amounted to what outraged consumers, solar companies and environmental advocates called “a tax on the sun,” so the commission pulled it back again.

But round three, released Nov. 10, remains a severe blow to the future of rooftop solar. It scraps the connection surcharge, but still cuts the rebate for energy returned to the grid by about 75%, decimating one of the strongest incentives for consumers to go solar.

November 16, 2022

Guest column: EPA has lost its way

By Tim Whitehouse

It has been more than 20 years since I worked as a senior attorney at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), using my legal training to help enforce the Clean Water Act, and advise agency managers on a range of hazardous waste issues.

When I joined the regulatory agency in 1992, I felt my work would matter; that I would play a small role in protecting public and environmental health. And during the ten years I worked there, I always felt I was making a positive difference and my managers were usually able to apply the law in ways that balanced the interests of various stakeholders.

Over the years, however, it has become more apparent that this is often no longer the case, and that powerful corporate interests have taken too much control over EPA’s decision-making processes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in EPA’s chemicals and pesticides programs.

The last 30 years have brought countless examples of EPA’s appalling incompetence and willful corruption as the agency routinely capitulates to the interests of the chemical industry and ignores or minimizes human health and environmental risks.

Newly unearthed documents regarding one such chemical – the weed killer paraquat – provide just the latest example of how inept the agency has become in protecting public health.

At the organization I work for now – Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility – we are currently representing EPA scientists who have bravely put their careers on the line to speak out publicly about the wrongdoing they’ve witnessed with the agency.

Through a series of disclosures to EPA’s Inspector General and Congress these scientists have provided extensive evidence of a system that operates in a black box where threats to human health from chemicals are routinely deleted from risks assessments, where agency managers routinely bow to industry wishes, where key managers move back and forth between jobs at the EPA and the chemical industry with scant scrutiny, and where managers ignore risk indicators and intimidate staff into signing off on assessments with insufficient data to reach a conclusion.

October 28, 2022

Postcard from California: Carbon capture won’t solve climate crisis

Four miles from my house, a Silicon Valley company wants to drill an 8,000-foot-deep well to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas identified as the main cause of the climate crisis.

The well, planned at the site of a former Army ammunition plant in Riverbank, Calif., could be one of a network of CO2 storage wells California is hoping will help the state reach its ambitious climate goals.

The idea is to trap emissions from petrochemical refineries, power plants and other industrial and agricultural sources, super-chill them into liquids that are piped through earthquake-vulnerable terrain, and pumped deep underground to to keep them from heating up the atmosphere.

This Rube Goldberg-like scheme is called carbon capture and sequestration. The captured CO2 can also be used in other industrial processes. A related scheme, direct air capture, sounds even more like science fiction, making use of giant vacuums to suck existing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

At first carbon capture may sound like a smart idea: The company seeking a permit to drill in Riverbank is named Aemetis, which it says means “one prudent wisdom.” But the type of carbon capture Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate policy counts on to reach “net-zero” CO2 emissions by 2045, is neither wise or prudent.

October 3, 2022

Postcard from California: State falling short on promise of clean water

By Bill Walker
In 2012, California became the first US state to establish a legal right to clean water.

The law declares that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

The law is less a mandate than an ideal: It requires state agencies to consider the right to water in all decisions, but explicitly says it does not obligate the state to provide or pay for safe water.

Now, ten years since the law’s enactment, a state oversight agency’s investigation shows how far short of its aspiration California has fallen.

In July, a report from the California State Auditor found that nearly 1 million Californians lack access to safe drinking water.

September 8, 2022

Postcard from California: Can new laws slow the “plastics pandemic?”

In July, a 130-foot vessel called the Kwai docked in Sausalito carrying a sickening cargo: 96 tons of plastic garbage and other trash recovered from the Pacific Ocean during a 45-day voyage from Honolulu.

Before arriving in California, the Kwai had sailed through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area more than twice the size of Texas that has been described as a “cloudy soup” of plastic debris and other trash accumulating in a vortex of swirling ocean currents.

The voyage was a project of the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute in partnership with the government of the Marshall Islands, which like other island nations is acutely threatened by rising sea levels from the melting of polar ice caps and icebergs. Since 2009, the institute’s Pacific expeditions have recovered nearly 700,000 pounds of trash; 340,000 pounds were collected in 2020 alone.

Each year, approximately 460 million metric tons of these plastics become plastic waste, and more than 90 percent does not get recycled.

September 7, 2022

Guest column: Overfishing poses threat to our oceans

Increasingly, it seems, environmental problems are dominating the news – plastic waste, illegal dumping, and toxic chemical contamination events are only a few of the issues we read about regularly.

But there is one important problem we rarely hear about- overfishing. Roughly 30 percent of commercially fished waters are now classified as “overfished,” meaning the breeding stock of an area becomes so depleted that the population cannot be replenished.

Commercial fishing, in which fish are caught in massive nets dragged through the ocean depths, is a $144 billion dollar industry supported by government spending and a consumer appetite for far more fish than we were eating 50 years ago. Indeed, over three billion people around the world rely on fish as their primary source of protein.

The result is that global fish stocks are dwindling, and many species of fish are being pushed close to extinction by overfishing, such as several types of cod, tuna, halibut and even lobster.

August 24, 2022

Guest column: Setting the stage for a food system transformation

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new $300 million Organic Transition Initiative offers meaningful investments in climate-friendly farming that meet urgent needs of communities across the country. The initiative sets the stage for a food system transformation that makes organic the norm – by aligning public spending with public interests in thriving ecosystems and healthy, affordable food.

Organic farming offers sweeping health, climate, and economic benefits – but it’s not easy, especially at the beginning. Land must be managed organically – without synthetic fertilizers and most pesticides – for three years before crops can be sold as organic. During those three years, as the land and ecosystems heal and find new balance, producers may face increased pest pressure, short-term decreases in yields, and a steep learning curve.

While many producers find that organic is worth it in the long run, the costs, time, and technical challenges involved in organic transition remain a barrier, especially for smaller operations with limited resources.

The expertise, experience, and willpower to farm and ranch organically have existed – and persisted – for decades, as evidenced by the consistent growth of the organic sector. And yet, decades of agricultural policy and investments have trapped many producers, workers, and consumers in a system that relies heavily on harmful synthetic inputs and that values short-term yields over long-term sustainability, health, and equity.

Today, less than 1% of U.S. farmland is certified organic, and the number of non-certified farms actively transitioning to organic has dropped nearly 71% since 2008.