Recently in Environment Category

I'm amazed by how only one in four Republicans in California worries about global warming as a serious threat, while half of independents and seven out of ten Democrats feel it's a big deal. Are we all reporting to different science labs each morning? No, we report to different political echo chambers each morning.

That's a nice way to mess up our children's world (well, your children; I'm gratefully progeny-free). Expanded drilling may be a short-term solution, but it's not as good a solution as curbing demand and taxing those arrogant Hummer drivers back to the Stone Age.

For years, I've driven past the oil derricks along the Santa Barbara coast, where there hasn't been a spill in four decades, and the rigs certainly haven't hurt real-estate values. They sit, innocuously, like specks on the horizon, making me wonder: Are the majority of Californians right to support off-shore drilling?

True, drilling is not the solution to our energy woes. But can't it be part of the solution? Couldn't increased domestic oil production help reduce our dependence on foreign oil -- a vital national-security need? What if we packaged drilling with a tariff on foreign oil, and used the revenues to fund green-power alternatives?

Why does the energy debate invariably boil down to either drilling or clean alternatives. Why can't the answer be and/both?

* Headline amended to belatedly give Paris her due.

The Lotus Festival this past weekend was missing a very essential element - a pond filled with the very pink-and-cream flowers that bear the festival's name. And while I'm not a regular at the annual floral celebration in Echo Park, it's pretty evident that the case of the missing lotus is a clear indication of a present-day environmental dilemma:

"Three years ago, the lotuses began to falter. Only an estimated 30 flowers bloomed last year. A handful of green leaves sprouted this spring -- only to turn yellow, shrivel and disappear. Not a single leaf remained Saturday," stated the LA Times.

Consulatants credit the lotuses' disappearance to changing temperature extremes, polluted water, pests, disease-- a whole plethora of environmental and natural disasters. Indeed, we don't need to whip out the textbook definition of global warming, or sprint for a copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth ,to understand the realities of climate change and environmental harm.

But I found the lotus anecdote to be an effective one. It's something that (literally) hits close to Angelenos' homes. As parents and children swarmed Echo Park Lake, expecting to be hit with a wave of light pink and green, they were thoroughly disappointed to find, well, absolutely nothing. Just a pool of muddy water and the sound of flowing drain pipes.

It's not to say that the lotus hiatus is an omen of the natural world's doom and destruction. But it's definitely reality check for many Angelenos and park officials across the board. We need to institute a system of ecological prevention and protection - if not for the integrity of the existing ecosystem, then at least for the aesthetic.

Let's hope for a successful Lotus Festival 2009.

Building green has struck a chord with college students across the board. Thus, it's only natural that university campuses and officials follow suit.

The University of California system instituted a policy in 2004 mandating that all new and renovated buildings be eco-friendly, and has subsequently saved up to $5 million. The Los Angeles Community College District is currently undergoing its "Go Green LACCD" program, designed to construct 40 buildings and facilities that will employ only renewable energy. And nearby Santa Clarita University utilizes natural ventilation in one of its buildings: the floors are raised 14 inches above the ground to encourage air circulation through yarn carpet-tile floors, and the building also includes a glass "solar chimney."

Indeed, California universities and campuses throughout the nation (including University of Michigan and Warren Wilson College in North Carolina) are jumping at the opportunity to build green, eco-friendly and energy-efficient dorms and facilities. The Green Building Council has even developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system to measure their progress.

My home turf, UCLA, has been recognized for its LEED-approved science building, La Kretz Hall, and is currently in the process of renovating one of its dorm buildings along those same guidelines. Last quarter, my history professor, Scott Bartchy, discussed how he designed his sustainable and energy-efficient house in Ventura County, utilizing architecture for solar heating and natural air-circulation cooling.

It's a strange and recent phenomenon that "going green" has become such a hot topic among college students. Perhaps we're simply trying to mimic the social revolutionary fervor of our parents' generation, and we're scrambling to institute some type of lasting change - whether that change be social, political or environmental. Perhaps it's because environmental studies has now become effortlessly ingrained into our traditional education - often allowing students the option to replace their standard Biology or Chemistry classes with green education. Or perhaps this is just a sign of the modern age: we've come to the realization that the energy resources and raw materials of our parents' generation will not be readily available to us in the future, and it's simply time for us to adjust.

Whatever the reason may be, I am overwhelmingly impressed by how my generation is responding to the green movement. Recently, UCLA students passed The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF) referendum, which would raise student fees by $4 every quarter to fund student-led environmental projects. And while this post may come off as extremely wide-eyed and hopeful for the future, it's comforting to know that my peers are responding to some issue - any issue - that impacts us on the global scale.

Interesting links:

Go Green LACCD

California Energy Commission

UC Ranked Top Green Public System

The Green Initiative Fund

My professor's eco-friendly house

I don't know why I get letters like these, but alas, I do. From today's inbox:

Chris, I am an 88 year old man and I am trying to write a book relating to global warming but I have not been able to find out what the height and position of the pollution belt is. I am very concerned about the effect the pollution is having on the Earth. I need that information because of the two possible solutions I have for eliminating the pollution belt. The first is to fly space ships through the belt with collecter devises that would pick up the pollution. I need that information because I am not sure if the space ships could fly at that elevation. My second idea is to explode an atomic bomb in the pollution and the chain reaction would destroy the pollution. BUT I do not know the height of the belt and do not know if the radiation fall out from the bomb would contaminate the Earth. I would appreciate it if you could help me in any way to find that information.

--Name withheld to protect the well-meaning but frighteningly delusional

I like our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. We have a very special relationship. I met him only once, but because I was seated with important people he didn't know that I'm not; and so exercising discretion, in at least this part of his life, he grasped my hand firmly in his two strong hands, gazed deeply into my eyes, as if no one else were in the room, and told me how sincerely pleased he was to meet me. Wow! Was he good! Imagine then my sense of bewilderment and betrayal when he never called and never wrote. Sigh. But what a guy. He never sleeps. He is at every banquet, school fair, retirement party and public event in Los Angeles. I'm sure my 8 year-old and 5 year-old grandsons were thrilled by his appearance at their elementary school fair on Saturday. When does he have time to work, to sleep, to think things through?

The great philosophical question before us is this: Are politicians born out of touch with reality and the public or do they become that way? This is variation of the "Nature versus Nurture" debate. What seems indisputable however is that politicians quickly display a degree of separation from our concerns, needs and realities.

We are witnessing our mayor proposing all kinds of increases on fees and fines. It will cost more to park. The fine for the expired meter will naturally also cost more. At the very same time our government is putting us at great economic peril and opening us up to a multi-million dollar fine by not paying the $81 million now due into our pension fund. The cost of this delay will be $15 million in the first year and accrue from there. Smart?

The garbage fees already recently raised will go up again. We recently received notice that a new company was being contracted to do our garbage pick up. Will they be sending three trucks as well? What are the ecological costs of three trucks instead of one doing our pick up? Does the increased pollutants in the air really balance the savings of trashing separation? Is the trash in fact remaining separate or is it being merged at the dump--as some have reported? We deserve to know. The new company will be replacing our black, blue and green trash receptacles. What will this cost? Who will pay? Ah, that we do know already. We will pay.

The libraries will close on Sundays, while other services will also be cut back. Money for police and fire departments will not be cut. However, we should at least ask how much of the increase in police budget will be used to pay for legal costs and civil judgments against the department? Are we paying for more protection or are we paying for a lack of professionalism and effective discipline? As we remember the May Day Melee of last year, we do need to know the true costs of policing and how much of our money goes to the beat cop and how much to cop beatings.

Most egregious and offensive of all the new "revenue enhancement" schemes is the special "congestion pricing" of our present carpool lanes. Since we no longer talk about taxes but revenue enhancements and fees, we are not supposed to notice that more is being extracted from our wallets--often for things we have already paid for.

The carpool lane itself turns out to be a misnomer. Designed to reward the socially acceptable behavior of carpooling, it was co-opted to reward those who could afford to buy a new hybrid. Then, as people actually complied, they started limiting the decals for carpool use by single drivers. Bait. Switch. Deny. Re-Purpose.

Now they are trying to takeover, slowly at first as a test project, the carpool lanes and turn them into revenue enhancers under the guise of "congestion fees."

Now there is no question that there is congestion. Just trying to breath un-conditioned air while driving congests me and creates a hacking cough and high-pitched wheeze. The traffic is also congested. How to handle it? Well, do what they did in London and charge people to enter the city. (Although I think they'd do better to charge people to leave. Many would pay any amount.) This way the rich can drive and the poor can take the train or metro. This way the wealthy will drive in comfort and the poor will waste $4 plus per gallon gasoline idling in the traffic jams. Hmmm. The rich will speed along while we have for the first time in history the "idling poor." This is as nasty a piece of Social-Darwinian social engineering as I have ever seen. You see, in London they have mass transit: trains, metros and several kinds of taxis. In Los Angeles we have, uh, well, not so much rapid transit. We do have freeways however.

Now they are desperately trying to take the free out of freeway. They began by building dedicated toll roads. Now they are trying to confiscate our already existing freeways and hold them hostage for money.

Aside from being elitist and unfairly benefiting the wealthy and punishing the poor, aside from doing nothing to truly solve our congestion problems, this has a still deeper flaw. Look at the gasoline tax you already pay. You and I have already paid for these roads--and we were probably fools for allowing the carpool lane precedent to begin the erosion of our rights.

I know the city and county need money. But we are not idiots. We see the fees and fines and are not happy. They want more money for less service. We can say No. We can ask them if our government really needs the staff and bureaucracy for each Council member and Supervisor? We can demand to know if they can justify being driven in city-owned and county-owned cars? Do the police need one person at a desk (sworn and unsworn) to support one officer in the field? Maybe the answer is Yes. Prove it.

None of these increased fees and fines, cut services and repossessed lanes is for any greater purpose than raising money. They are so much better at raising money than saving it. Maybe if Mayor Villaraigosa would do his own driving and pay for his own gas, he'd come to understand the plight of the growing poor and the shrinking middle class. Maybe. Mr. Mayor, be in touch.

I admit it: In my early driving days, I was a slave to Jiffy Lube. The little stickers the oil-changers gave me told me to change the oil every 3,000 miles, and obediently, I complied. I blame my parents. As a kid, I remember the time the engine of a family car ceased because no one had ever bothered to change the oil. I was never going to make that mistake, I vowed.

So I went to the other extreme, and continued for years. Especially here in SoCal, with a long commute, it felt like nary a month or two passed without another trip to EZ, Jiffy, or one of them Lubes.

But then one day I got a crazy idea: I read my car's owner's manual. Turns out my Honda Accord only needs an oil change every 10,000 miles. And my wife's Ford Explorer only every 5,000.

I had been an oil-changin' sucker.

I wasn't alone. The California Integrated Waste Management Board reports that 73 percent of Californians change their oil more frequently than necessary -- often every 3,000 miles, just like the lubers suggest. So the CIWMB is launching "The 3,000-Mile Myth" campaign to get motorists to stop changing oil so much -- for the good of their pocketbooks and the good of the environment.

So do yourself and the world a favor -- and don't change your oil. Well, at least not more than necessary, anyway. If you're unsure how often you should change it, go to 3000milemyth.org, punch in your make/model/year, and you'll get the info the folks at Jiffy Lube don't want you to know about.

Another bad idea bites the dust, as California drops its plans to control the temperatures in our homes via remote control. Guess that means Sacramento's "if it's yellow let it mellow" monitor is going to have be shelved for a while, too ...

When on long driving trips, as I was today, I often listen to Rush Limbaugh. His rants and screeds keep my blood pressure elevated and my attention focused. I often find him funny and fairly clever in his arguments and rhetoric. I can appreciate a pro—even when I strenuously disagree.

Therefore I was so stunned to find myself giving him “major liberal dittos” today that I nearly ran off of I-5 (on my way to visit my two perfect, beautiful and brilliant granddaughters). In between razzing Hillary for her haggard appearance, Bill for his lusts and global warming Cassandras for believing that global warming is man made, he was mocking the idea that ethanol could contribute in any way to a better world. I so hated the fact that I agreed with him that I spent the next four hours questioning my reasoning.

Upon conscientious reflection, I again concluded that ethanol is a terrible idea on every level. It does not make the environment cooler. We must refine it and then burn it in our cars. We still expend energy in tilling the fields, planting and then harvesting the crops. It does not significantly change our importation of oil from the Middle East—and won’t for the foreseeable future.

Ethanol is a feel good boondoggle. Only John McCain has had the huevos, the chutzpah to tell Iowans that he opposes governmental subsides for ethanol. The rest of the presidential panderers tell the Iowans what they want to hear. It seems like a win-win, but it is really a lose-lose proposition.

Some day, our descendents will look at our choice to turn food into fuel for our cars, while human beings starved, as a crime against humanity. How, I wonder, can my fellow liberals think that this is not monstrous but actually a good and noble idea?

That we, in all countries, spew smoke into the skies is bad enough. That our industrial production poisons our rivers and oceans is clearly terrible. But how, in good conscience, can we trade arable land and the production of calories, that feed bodies and keep people alive, into transportation? Our choice to do this has a cost in lives.

Some day we may turn the wind and tides into energy. Some day we will learn how to build the means of storing the sun’s energy. Till then, we will burn oil and coal, and it will degrade our environment. But turning our fields from food to fuel does several murderous things. It raises the price of food. The less corn for food for us and livestock, the more expensive the corn becomes. The higher the subsidy for corn, the more fields get turned to its cultivation and removed from other food crops.
When you consider how much corn is used in food, there is an enormous domino effect in our whole food chain.

Oil costs far more than we think. There is the price of getting it, refining it and shipping it. There is also the unaccounted cost of protecting it—hence wars around the world, the costs of which are not directly paid at the pump, but are paid none-the-less in our military budget and foreign aid to protect trade routs and prop up bad governments.

These are all good reasons to move towards other ways of producing energy. There is a price for oil that we pay in blood. But squeeze corn life also oozes out—not with the terrible violence of our oil wars of the last 100 years, but with slow and agonizing deaths by hunger and malnutrition.

Yes, other non-caloric crops have similar consequences—coffee, tea, tobacco and even flowers come at a cost. Maybe we are willing to pay, but it is never with the thought that we pay with our own lives or the lives of our children. Yet, it does come home to us—but again, like the invisible but real oil subsidy, not directly. Hunger breeds desperation and war. In our shrinking world, we will not be able to contain the hunger in the Third World. Their pain, their suffering and their rage will come to our shores, and we shall surely send our children to theirs.

As bad as oil is and as much as we need to transition from it, taking food from the mouths of babies so we can argue about changing mandated mileage from 25 to 35 MPG in ten years is cruel nonsense and the future will not forgive us our moral callousness or willful ignorance.

Many of our social policies and choices are between imperfect policies. We make many difficult, really agonizing, moral choices. Moral calculus should be agonizing and not feel good delusions. We are used to thinking about guns and butter. How about oil, food, flour and flowers? We have tough choices to make; let’s make them honestly.

Having worked in the media for most of my adult life, I am well aware that the professionals in this business are a smart, well-educated bunch. Which is why, for the life of me, I can't understand why they seem to turn into blithering idiots whenever the subject of religion arises. For the latest case in point, see this widely cited Times of London piece, The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom, and its lede:

"Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

"The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering."

Wow, next thing you know BXVI will be putting a fatwa on Al Gore's head!

The sensitive green souls over at Wonkette responded with a post titled The Pope Sucks, in which they call Benedict a "Nazi," and quote the Times' paraphrase of his remarks as though it were verbatim. They sign off by wishing His Holiness "a jolly f***-you," albeit theirs in uncensored.

But wait in a minute. The subject of the Times article is the Pope's Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, which he will deliver on January 1. You can read it for yourself here. But be forwarned: You will be disappointed, as it bears almost no resemblance to the anti-green screed that the Times -- and, following its lead, countless other media organizations -- have made it out to be.

For starters, the address isn't about the environment. Primarily, it's about the role of the family in society. Secondarily, it's about the state of the human family in the era of globalization. Within this context, the pope writes about the human family's "home," the earth, and concludes:

We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.

That's a sentiment that most greens, save for the most rabid and misanthropic among them, would entirely agree with, no? As for the subject of global warming, the Holy Father has this to say: