Mayor Villaraigosa Pledges to Make LA Coal Free by 2020

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had his second inauguration yesterday, at which he pledged to make L.A. a coal free city by 2020. This will be no small feat since DWP, which provides power to much of LA, is one of the largest users of coal in the state. In fact they get 40% of their power from coal. If he is successful in changing that, it will be a major accomplishment in clean energy for the state. Here is the relevant excerpt from the speech:

"At the center of our economic strategy is our green agenda. Angelenos, there are two shades of green, and they go together beautifully in L.A.!

We know that in the decade to come entire industries will come into being answering the riddle of how America can more sustainably meet its energy needs.

We know our very future depends on advances in conservation, solar, wind, and geothermal energy. We know economic growth and environmental innovation must be seen as fingers on the same hand.

Within walking distance from here, our clean-tech corridor will put L.A. on the international map as a center of green jobs and innovation as home to our best minds, a partnership between world-class universities and emerging industries and a leading incubator for President Obama's economic vision of green jobs at good pay.

And we know never to lose sight of our successful effort to put L.A. at the forefront in the fight against climate change. In the last four years, we quadrupled our renewable energy portfolio. We've removed 2,000 dirty diesel trucks from the port and sent them to the junkyard. And we've left much of the world in the dust by beating the Kyoto targets four years ahead of schedule.

It's now time to meet the carbon challenge. Our second goal for the next four years is to put L.A. on a path to permanently break our addiction to coal. Coal currently accounts for roughly 40% of the DWP's power portfolio. Breaking the coal habit is a long term proposition demanding a long-term commitment. It's going to require investment from ratepayers. Our future depends on pricing power in relation to the environmental cost.

During my first term, we set high standards for green development and we've taken action to meet them. Los Angeles will get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by next year. We rolled out the most far reaching green building standards of any big city in America.

And this month, the largest city-owned wind farm will start delivering clean power to L.A.'s families. Moving forward we're aiming to get 40% of our power from renewable sources by 2020 and go 60% carbon-free by the end of the next decade.

Today, I am directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020. Meanwhile, we're going to move beyond the clean air action plan - the most aggressive effort to cut emissions at any port worldwide. We are going to electrify goods movement at our harbor.

We're going to make L.A. plug-in ready, aimed at making our city a national hub of the electric vehicle market.

And we're going to say to every household and every family. This is the time to power our future with conservation and alternative energy.

This is the time to stand at the forefront of the green revolution. This is the time to build a future founded on innovation and defined by our commitment to building a more sustainable and livable Los Angeles."

A Sprinkler System with a Brain

One of the cool products I heard about at LOHAS 2 weeks ago was Cyber-Rain. They call it a sprinkler system with a brain. It's a smart sprinkler control system that uses real time online weather data to help save 30-70 percent of water use. It grabs the data wirelessly and adjusts sprinkling accordingly.

You just attach it to your automatic sprinkler system. You set up and program your controller on your home computer and that's it. The system adjusts the amount of water delivered based on your local weather conditions and then tracks your water use and savings.

The system retails for $399, which is not cheap, but can save you up to $170 a year. Plus, rebates are available throughout the Southern California water municipalities. In Orange County, they cover the full $399 purchase price of Cyber-Rain, making the unit essentially free. At that price, you'd be crazy not to get one!

There are other water-friendly choices out there - having less lawn, using drought-resistant plants - but for those that want to keep a green, grassy lawn, this seems like a good option.

Important Vote Today

An important vote is scheduled to take place in the House today on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as ACES, Waxman-Markey and the climate change bill. I have been giving some thought to my position on the bill and it's complicated.

I know, you're saying GG, you write about the need for action at the policy level, what's so complicated about supporting a bill that includes a carbon cap along with renewable energy and energy efficiency standards?

Well, from what I can tell, the caps include so many give-aways to fossil fuels that they are rather toothless. The renewable energy standard is too low. I believe it is now at 15% by 2020. This despite that 71% of the American public supports at least 25% by 2020. The states are pre-empted for a period of time from setting higher standards and the bill strips the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

On the other hand, the energy efficiency measures, from what I understand, are pretty decent. And even weak standards and a flawed bill are more than we have had.

Let's be honest, we need to get to somewhere between 25% and 40% below 1990 emissions by 2020. The measures in this bill get us to 4% below.

Yet, this bill cannot fail right now. Because here's the deal. If I thought it was going to fail for being too weak, I would be okay with that. If I thought it would fail and people would tell Congress to go back to the drawing board and write a bill that is more in line with where scientists say we need to be.

But I fear this bill might fail for asking for too much, even though it asks relatively little. And that scares me. So if you think your Representative is going to vote against the bill because it's too agressive, it's time to get on the phone and call them and tell them to vote yes on Waxman-Markey and then get busy finding ways to make it even stronger.

Boycott ExxonMobil

In 2008, ExxonMobil publicly said they would stop funding global warming science deniers. But the Guardian reports that records show that they have continued to fund lobbying groups that deny human created climate change.

"Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000."

This despite a promise to stop:

"In its 2008 corporate citizenship report, published last year, ExxonMobil said it would cut funds to several groups that "divert attention" from the need to find new sources of clean energy."

Remember my post on where to buy gas? ExxonMobil got an F. This is part of the reason why. Instead of being a company that provides energy, and so providing forms of energy that are renewable and don't pollute, they are a company that provides b.s.

ExxonMobil is full of it and so we should stop buying their gas.

Why Climate Science Is Irrelevant

At her address to the LOHAS conference a few weeks ago, sustainability guru Hunter Lovins said that the science of climate change doesn’t matter. As a writer covering climate change, I couldn’t agree more.

Here’s why; even if all the well respected scientists in the world, including our own scientists at NASA, are dead wrong about climate change and its causes, there are a few things that are not scientific conjecture but basic fact. Whether you believe in climate science or not, if you get those facts, we will be on the same page when it comes to energy.

One, fossil fuels are a dwindling resource. They are becoming more expensive and difficult to find. The knowledge that fossil fuels are running out has led to great instability in the energy market which has led to instability of corporate profitability and household incomes alike. Having an energy source that is running out and does not have a fixed cost is bad for business. Solar, wind and geothermal have upfront costs, but the energy they generate is based on a resource that is renewable, free and relatively easy to tap. Sorry, but coal, oil and natural gas have no business case when you stack them up against that.

Two, fossil fuels are costing us. They are costing us, dearly. We are in hock up to our ears to China to buy oil from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In May, we imported 366 million barrels of oil which means that 65% of the oil we used was imported from foreign countries to the tune of $21.6 billion sent overseas. Let me write that number again. $21.6 billion removed from our economy in just one month to pay for oil. Even Texas Oilman T. Boone Pickens says that foreign oil is ruining the economy. Why would we ruin the economy when we have domestic, renewable energy sources?

Three, renewable energy provides more jobs than fossil fuels. And with over 9% unemployment last month, we desperately need jobs. In February, I wrote about wind jobs versus coal jobs. At that time, there were 85,000 jobs in wind to coal mining’s 81,000 jobs although coal produces 50% of our energy and wind only 2%.  A recent Pew Study shows that green jobs are growing twice as fast as all other jobs. You could care less about climate change but want to kick start the US economy? Support renewable energy!

Four, much of the money we send out of the country to buy oil goes to countries that don’t like us much. Some of them actually hate us. When it comes to national security, that is just reckless. And it is particularly reckless when we have domestic options like wind, sun and thermal energy. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has a Prius that he converted to a plug in hybrid. He became an electric car advocate after running a war game for Representative Jane Harman in which he hypothesized what would happen if the Middle East cut off our oil supply. The outcome wasn’t pretty. He has a bumper sticker on the back of his plug-in. It says “Osama Bin Laden Hates My Car”. And guess who had an electric car in the 1990’s? A security hawk who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, Former Secretary of State George Schultz.

Five, domestic fossil fuel extraction is destroying the homeland. I like to tell this story, so I’m going to tell it here. It actually has a point. Right before the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the so-called great men that were putting the thing together came up with a brilliant idea for getting clean water to the fairgrounds. They found a pristine spring in Wisconsin and decided they would dig a pipeline and pipe it from there to Chicago. When they got to this little village in Wisconsin to start laying the pipe, the villagers met them with pitchforks and ran them out of town. If a foreign corporation came in and said they were going to blow the tops off our mountains, pollute our streams, put oil rigs off our shores and destroy our natural habitats, we would be like those villagers. Why would we let any corporation destroy the flora and fauna of this great country when we have wind and solar that do not require removal of a single mountaintop or destruction of a single wildlife preserve? Why would we uglify one single bit of our country when we don’t have to?

On a recent Q&A call with Representatives Waxman and Markey on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (with the awesome acronym of ACES, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill), Congressman Markey said that the Republican energy plan of maintaining the status quo accept for drastic increases in nuclear energy (which is expensive, dirty and dangerous) is like switching from one pack of cigarettes a day to two.

With all due respect to Congressman Markey, I think he’s wrong. When someone smokes, they are mostly hurting themselves. This is actually more like giving the sum of our entire treasury to Al Qaeda, along with a nuclear bomb and the delivery system. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or any science at all, to see that’s not a good idea.

The End of the Line

Over the weekend, I saw the documentary The End of the Line about the fishing industry. It's a powerful indictment of how we have turned the hunting of these wild animals into big business. The fishing industry, legally and illegally, uses methods of finding and capturing fish that don't leave the fish a chance.

Take Blue Fin Tuna. The EU determined a fishing allotment that was more than twice what scientists recommended for the species to survive, let alone recover. The actual catch when you include illegal catching is more than twice the EU's number. The blue fin don't stand a chance. And the largest broker of the tuna? Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan. We don't think of that when we buy their cars and electronics. And restaurants like Nobu refuse to take blue fin off the menu.

Or take North Atlantic Cod, a fish that has completely collapsed because of overfishing. Or that the amount of small fish like sardines that are killed to feed farmed fish like salmon is more than the amount of salmon it feeds.

Here's another tidbit I learned. The reason fish caught in Alaskan waters are almost always environmentally sustainable is because Alaska has strong regulation that allows for fishing only 10% of stocks so that populations don't collapse. There's more on the good news front. From McDonald's to Wal-Mart, there is a focus on serving and selling only sustainable and Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified fish.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the UK chain Pret a Manger took tuna off the menu after seeing the film.

The End of the Line producers have also started a campaign, asking consumers to take a pledge to take several actions:

-         Only eat sustainable seafood by asking where your fish comes from and how it was caught before you buy. Not sure what is sustainable? Check out Seafood Watch or use FishPhone by texting 30644 with the message FISH and the name of the fish in question. They’ll text you back with an assessment and better alternatives to fish with significant environmental concerns. Or ask your favorite restaurants to only use fish that is Marine Stewardship Council certified. You can buy MSC certified products at a number of stores and specialty shops including Wal-Mart, Safeway, Costco and Target.

-         Tell politicians to develop fishing quotas based on science and precaution

-         Join the campaign for marine protected areas and responsible fishing. Currently, only 3% of the world’s oceans are protected areas, tell politicians we want more protected marine reserves.

If you’re a fish eater, see the film. It’s not about giving up fish. It’s about understanding where your fish comes from and why it matters. It’s a film about saving fish species so that we can continue to get sustenance from the sea.

About Going Green

This site is about how to live a more sustainable, environmentally friendly lifestyle, and how to do it without breaking the bank or suggesting such a drastic change in the way you live that it seems impossible to accomplish. The thing about going green is that it should be a win-win; it should make your life easier, more fulfilling, more pleasurable, healthier and more fun, while taking care of the health and well being of our planet and the millions of folks that share it. It will feature green tips and suggestions, as well as resources for anyone and everyone. I welcome questions, comments and suggestions.

Leslie Berliant