If you live in the San Joaquin Valley you should maybe think twice about drinking milk. The energy intensive and unsustainable nature of factory animal farming causes massive pollution to the valley’s air. Even a single glass of milk has significant negative impacts.
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Hosts: Dolores Weller
Guest: Jose Joseph, MD, UCSF -Fresno
On the second day of his two-day tour through the San Joaquín Valley, EPA regional administrator Jared Blumenfeld visited the east Tulare County communities of East Orosi and Seville.
Standing in the driveway of an East Orosi home, Blumenfeld listened to the personal stories of community residents like Berta Díaz, in pink, who has fought for more than a decade for clean drinking water.
This is a promising development for any resident of the San Joaquin Valley in California. Hopefully the EPA is taking similar steps in other problem areas throughout the country. In the meantime, the health risks for people living in the San Joaquin Valley remain significant. Certain vehicle emissions have been linked to birth defects, such as carbon monoxide. A pregnant mother’s repeated exposure to carbon monoxide may increase the risk that her baby could be born with brain damage, congenital heart defects, reduced birth weight, or that it could be stillborn.
If your child has a birth defect that you believe is due to air pollution in your area, you have some options for relief. One would be to file a lawsuit against the entity responsible for ensuring that proper air quality standards are met, such as the EPA or a similar state agency. That option would be best if the cause of pollution is so diffuse (such as thousands of cars traveling the freeway each morning) you cannot sue an individual offender. However, if you can identify the source of the pollution, such as a factory or a power plant, you could file a toxic tort lawsuit directly against the offender, claiming that the offender acted negligently in allowing harmful levels of toxins to pollute the air.
State regulators have approved sweeping auto emission standards designed to reduce air pollution by requiring cleaner cars on the roads.
New cars driving on California roads will get a bit cleaner when it comes to gas emissions. On Friday, the state’s Air Resources Board passed rules requiring auto manufacturers to offer more electric and hybrid veh8icles by the year 2025.
“We’d always like to see things move more quickly and people who want clean air are celebrating this decision,” said Kevin Hall, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. The plan requires 15 percent or about 1.4 million new cars sold in the state be zero or very-low emission vehicles to help reduce gas pollutants.
Local residents might soon pay more for trash pickup, as Stanislaus County supervisors are considering revamping a contract with the company that burns trash to produce electricity at Crows Landing’s Fink Road Landfill.
The city of Modesto and the county aim to drastically reduce their involvement in the finances of the garbage incinerator and to boost use fees after losing $3.5 million last year. They also face increasingly costly environmental restrictions.
The San Joaquin Valley Air Board has proposed to renew the Title V permit for Mt Poso Cogen to continue burning coal as a cheap energy source which provides steam for injection into the oil fields of Kern County. What follows is a discussion of this crazy situation.
The recent spate of high particle pollution days in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley regions is a stark reminder that California’s legacy of severe air pollution continues today. Over the past two months, stagnant air conditions have led to unhealthy pollution levels, especially troubling to those suffering from asthma and other respiratory conditions. Cars, trucks and other vehicles, and the fossil fuels they burn, contribute to smog and particle pollution and to greenhouse gases that threaten our planet. Fortunately, the California Air Resources Board is set to vote this month on a landmark rule to cut auto emissions – welcome news for all Californians.
The effort to bring healthy water to Valley towns moved forward Wednesday after federal officials heard directly from residents about the ongoing problem.
Members of the Environmental Protection Agency toured parts of the Valley, in hopes of getting a closer look at just how bad people’s drinking water is.
The water coming out of the faucet may look clean, but Seville resident Rebecca Quintana says it’s filled with unhealthy levels of nitrates and bacteria.
Rebecca Quintana said, “We don’t have that luxury of just turning on the water and being able to drink or cook.”