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We’re not in Kansas — or even Arizona or California — anymore
By Barbara Kessler
If global warming wasn’t so devastatingly tangible, it would sound like part of a doomsday cult. Consider these projections of the future for a swath of the U.S.
First up: Kansas, the American heartland, breadbasket to the world, a place of amber waves of grain…a place we might not recognize by century’s end.
Under projected global warming scenarios, Kansas will become hotter and drier, with more insects and more storms during the next several decades. By century’s end, western Kansas will be so arid, it will need 8 more inches of water to sustain crops there. Eastern Kansas will be wetter, but so warm that evaporation will claim the extra rainfall and southwestern Kansas will be a virtual desert. All this according to a report released last week by University of Kansas scientists Nathaniel Brunsell and Johannes Feddema for the Climate Change and Energy Project based in Salina, Kansas.
But wait, Dorothy, there’s more.
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Tags: · Arizona, BarbaraKesslerBlog, California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kansas, Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, Santa Barbara, wildfires
American winemakers green up with a toast to the old ways
By Shermakaye Bass
The Spanish word “salud” (meaning “to your health”) is often used by wine lovers when raising a glass. But when it comes to growing grapes and making wine, not all is in the best of health, especially where ecology is concerned. Grape growing can be just as tough on the land as any [...]
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Tags: · biodynamic wine, California, Farmers, Organic wine, vinyards
California report shows green energy policies generate jobs
By John DeFore
Anyone skeptical about talk of “green jobs” this campaign season might take note of a new report in which economists, not politicians, find that three decades of green policies in California have created about 1.5 million jobs. Some energy jobs were lost along the way as well. But the authors found that: “For every new job foregone in these sectors, however, more than 50 new jobs have been created across the state’s diverse economy.”
 Written by David Roland-Holst of Berkeley’s Center for Energy, Resources, and Economic Sustainability (CERES), the report is intended to help decision makers gauge the economic impact of enforcing the emission-reduction goals of a 2006 California law called the Global Warming Solutions Act.
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Tags: · California, clean energy, global warming, Green jobs
California’s message to cities: unsprawl
By Barbara Kessler
Once again, California is leading the way toward greener cities. Today, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that addresses sprawl concretely (and one hopes that’s concrete mixed with recycled fly ash).
Many states and cities have talked about the need to shorten commutes and to connect work centers with fuel-saving public transportation. These talks have sometimes yielded more commuter rail lines, bike paths and awards for urban renewal projects. But just as often, they’ve produced more talk.
Dealing holistically with sprawl has seemed beyond the grip of many large cities where the citizenry and leadership have long equated bigger with better. (Need we name these Sunbelt perpetrators?)
Now California may help break the impasse. The bill, SB 375, signed today puts some green on the table - to push the issue beyond talk. It will link federal transportation funding to climate change goals, offering incentives to builders to keep their projects closer to city hubs and to build more affordable housing projects within major metro areas.
Denser urban population growth will mean shorter, fewer commutes, translating to lower fuel consumption, preserved agricultural land and cleaner air. Neat how those things all go hand in hand, huh? The re-direct will help the state meet its goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Critics were miffed that during machinations, the building lobby won some exemptions from some other environmental requirements for those pursuing these incentives. But as we’ve seen in Congress, even crisis legislation can crack and falter if compromises aren’t made.
Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media
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Tags: · BarbaraKesslerBlog, California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzegger, green building, Sprawl, Transporation
Redwood tree-sitters come down
By John DeFore
Once upon a time, the only humans who lived in trees were such fictional folks as Tarzan and the hero of  Italo Calvino’s charming romance The Baron in the Trees. That was before the “tree-sitting” phenomenon, in which activists climb into trees threatened by development and refuse to come down.
The population of real-life tree dwellers shrank this month as the last two participants in a 20-year-old protest agreed to leave their perch in Northern California redwoods.
As the story was reported locally, the protest ended after bankruptcy put the Pacific Lumber Company under new ownership. Humboldt Redwood Co., which took the company over, committed to a sustainable-harvest policy that the Associated Press says “promised to spare any redwood that sprouted before 1800 with a diameter of at least 4 feet. It also pledged to avoid clear-cutting, a practice that the timber giant aggressively practiced under its previous owner, Maxxam Inc.”
Humboldt president and chief forester Michael Jani trekked out to the occupied trees himself to make the promise explicit, and the activists are taking him at his word. Last week, the final tree-sitters in Humboldt County gave up their temporary homes, including a 300-foot tree at least 1,500 years old where 22-year-old Billy Stoetzer had lived (in a hammock shelter) for almost a year.
Organizers tell reporters that they’ll keep an eye on the area to ensure that promises are kept. Since Humboldt Redwood is owned in large part by the owners of The Gap, they’d have plenty of opportunities for high-profile protest if things were to change.
For more information about old growth redwood forests, see this National Park Service webpage.
(Photo: National Park Service.)
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Tags: · California, Humboldt Redwood Company, National Parks, Old Growth Forests, Redwoods, Tree Sitters
Western climate initiative sets emissions targets
September 23rd, 2008 · No Comments
By Barbara Kessler
While the world waits for Washington to act on one looming crisis - the Wall Street mortgage debacle -  states in the Western U.S. acted today on another crisis, announcing a plan to reduce emissions to combat global warming.
The Western Climate Initiative, a collaborative of seven Western states and four Canadian provinces, agreed to try to reduce carbon emissions to 15 percent lower than 2005 levels by 2020.
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Tags: · Arizona, British Columbia, California, Climate Change, Manitoba, Montana, New Mexico, Ontario, Oregon, Quebec, Union of Concerned Scientists, Utah, Washington, Western Climate Initiative
Pre-teen Farmers No Longer Outlaws In Clayton, California
By John DeFore
With the locavore ideal so much in the media these days and produce of vague origin sparking so many health scares, you’d think the last thing a city would go out of its way to do would be discourage local growers. Especially if those growers are adorable little girls.
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Tags: · California, Farmers, Locavore, Produce
Water: Why We Squander It…
By Shermakaye Bass
When legislators cross party lines and governors publicly plead for water reform, you know the country’s water crunch has reached a new degree of direness.
 And yet, some conservationists ask, who’s really listening?
In late July an Opinion column appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers. In it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, attempted to jolt water-hoggers into acknowledging that their state is in a full-blown water crisis.
The unlikely duo delivered frightening news: California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta Reservoir, is operating at only 48 percent capacity this year, and the state’s second largest water storage reservoir, Lake Oroville, has less water to spare than it has in three decades. California’s multi-year drought has allowed wildfires to gobble up more than a million acres this year. And job-loss has become a major factor, they say, noting that in two of the past three years, the Pacific salmon fisheries (which impact tens of thousands of jobs) have shut down because there just isn’t enough salmon for fishing.
In light of those facts, you have to scratch your head over why Americans, who consume two to three times the amount of Europeans daily, still squander water, the most essential thing to life itself.
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Tags: · Agriculture, California, Drought, Pacific Institute, Water Conservation
California Wants EPA To Regulate Aircraft, Ship Emissions
By Barbara Kessler
California is at it again. The state stickler for clean air, which tried to regulate car emissions but was blocked by the federal EPA in late 2007, is now asking the feds to regulate pollution from aircraft, ships and off-road vehicles.
CA attorney Jerry Brown said that California, joined by other states and [...]
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Tags: · California, Clean Air, EPA, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Greenhouse Gas Emissions Regulation
California Leads in Fighting Oil Addiction
By John DeFore
California leads the nation in efforts to curb its addiction to oil, according to a report issued this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The group’s second annual report is mainly intended to measure each state’s relative vulnerability to rising oil prices, suggesting that while “the federal government has a responsibility to take [...]
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Tags: · California, gasoline, Natural Resources Defense Council, oil
Southern California Edison Begins Construction of World’s Largest Solar Panel Installation Project
ROSEMEAD, Calif. — Southern California Edison (SCE) has begun installing solar panels at the first of approximately 150 Southern California commercial rooftops that eventually will make up SCE’s two-square-mile solar generation project — the largest solar panel installation in the world, according to the energy company.
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Tags: · California, Solar Power
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