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Capping the Porter Ranch gas leak isn’t enough
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on January 22nd, 2016
LA Times: While the Southern California Gas Co. continues its work on a relief well that will, hopefully, stop the three-month-long gas leak near Porter Ranch, lawmakers are beginning on the next essential step: developing regulations to reduce the risk of another massive leak from an underground natural gas storage facility that will once again sicken people and wreak havoc on the environment.
The human and financial impact from the current leak has been tremendous. Some 2,600 families have temporarily...
Saving water was the priority in California
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on December 26th, 2015
LA Times: The fourth consecutive year of drought in California forced everyone to take extraordinary measures to save water. Californians were up to the challenge in 2015, drastically reducing consumption and studying long-term alternatives to address the water shortage from farms to urban areas.
To make matters worse, this year marked our state’s highest temperature in 120 years, since record-keeping began. The fact that this drought has been much hotter than those in the 20th century spurred a greater...
Can California meet its ambitious greenhouse gas goals?
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on August 23rd, 2015
LA Times: When President Obama announced his controversial and ambitious Clean Power Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, Californians gave a collective yawn. The president's goal of generating 28% of the nation's electricity from renewable resources by 2030 paled next to California's push, which began nearly a decade ago, to fuel 33% of its electrical needs with solar, wind and other renewables by 2020.
The state's commitment to a serious climate change policy began in 2006 with the...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on Can California meet its ambitious greenhouse gas goals?Playing politics w/ California drought
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on February 3rd, 2014
LA Times: As California's drought continues, and more than a dozen rural communities ponder what to do when their drinking water runs out sometime in March, it would be nice if the state's Republican politicians brought some straightforward plans for relief to the table. But what many of them are bringing instead is a tired political tactic barely, and laughably, disguised as a remedy for the lack of rainfall.
The "man-made California drought" is the term House Republicans use to describe the state's current...
Why not get tough on water use, California?
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on February 3rd, 2014
LA Times: To hear Gov. Jerry Brown tell it, California is in a "mega drought" -- perhaps the worst dry spell it's ever known. So why does he keep calling for voluntary water conservation?
The governor met with Southern California water officials Thursday morning and, again, they bemoaned the seriousness of the drought. Yet the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California -- the wholesaler that delivers most of the region's water supply -- reiterated the governor's call for voluntary...
California’s drought, times three
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on January 26th, 2014
LA Times: Southern Californians are facing not one drought but three, interconnected yet distinct, each bringing its own hazards and each requiring its own emergency and long-term responses.
The first drought is regional, caused by the lack of rain in our own mountains and our own backyards. In normal winters -- or rather those we have come to accept as normal -- storms blow south from the Gulf of Alaska, churning in a counterclockwise direction and keeping much of their stored water in the air until they...
Nuclear waste can’t wait
Posted by LA Times: Editorial on August 25th, 2013
LA Times: In the 1957 Isaac Asimov short story "Silly Asses," Earthlings are added to a galactic book of planetary races that have reached maturity -- defined as those that have developed nuclear capability. But then the keeper of the book learns that atomic tests are being conducted on Earth and crosses the planet off the list. Asimov was writing during the A-bomb years, before the construction of nuclear power plants. How unacceptable would it seem to the fictional keeper of the book that we have been building...