California did not adequately consider alternatives to its plan to create a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions, a judge ruled on Monday, a setback for the most aggressive effort by a state to combat climate change.
The state’s regulator on climate change matters, the Air Resources Board, will need to consider other possibilities to meet state environmental law, said Judge Ernest Goldsmith of San Francisco Superior Court.
A San Francisco superior court judge has put California’s sweeping plan to curb greenhouse gas pollution on hold, saying the state did not adequately evaluate alternatives to its cap-and-trade program.
In a 35-page decision, Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith said the Air Resources Board had failed to consider public comments on the proposed measures before adopting the plan, which affects a broad swath of the state’s economy. In particular, the judge noted, officials gave short shrift to analyzing a carbon fee, or carbon tax, devoting a “scant two paragraphs to this important alternative” to a market-based trading system in their December 2008 plan.
On Friday, a California superior court judge handed down his decision in the challenge, brought by environmental justice advocates, to the state’s implementation of AB 32, California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act.
The decision is available here. More analysis to come. On first read, the decision looks very similar to the tentative decision issued by the court about a month ago (and discussed here and here). It holds in favor of the CA Air Resources Board on all substantive challenges to the state’s compliance with AB 32 mandates, showing substantial deference to ARB concerning how best to reach the greenhouse gas reduction goals set by the legislature in AB 32.
On March 17, 2011 a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled that the California Air Resources Board violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) when it failed to properly consider alternatives to a “cap and trade” program in its plan to implement AB 32, the California Climate Solutions Act. Cap and trade is pollution trading that allows the worst polluters to continue or increase their pollution by buying “reductions.” These polluters are disproportionately located in low income communities of color. Instead of reducing pollution and creating jobs in California, dirty facilities, like oil refineries, get to buy credits from often unverifiable projects in other states and countries.
While most Californians take for granted that safe water is readily available at the turn of a tap, a growing number of communities, primarily in the San Joaquin Valley and other agricultural areas of the state, face very real impacts from nitrate contamination of the drinking water sources serving their homes and schools. New research led by the Pacific Institute, The Human Costs of Nitrate-Contaminated Drinking Water in the San Joaquin Valley, finds that nitrate contamination of groundwater has wide-reaching effects on California’s health, economic vitality, and environmental well being, disproportionately affecting low-income households and Spanish-speaking residents.
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More than 1 million Valley residents at times get drinking water tainted by fertilizers, sewage and animal waste, a new study shows.
Poverty-level families must buy bottled water, resulting in monthly bills several times higher than they should pay for safe drinking water. And the cost to clean up the problem would be at least $150 million, says Pacific Institute, the Oakland think tank, which added up the price tags on proposed projects that have not been funded.
The study, being released today, is the first to link both the extent of the contamination and the financial burden on residents.
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When Californians think of the Central Valley, they often think of its problems: poverty, pesticides, disputes over the allocation of irrigation water, farmworker deaths, and, most recently, a cluster of babies born with birth defects in the small town of Kettleman City. These are some of the ways this region makes the statewide news. But the Central Valley also has a rich history of community organizing and its own stark beauty. These photographs by Tracy Perkins and the oral histories she collected to accompany them document an important aspect of life there: environmental-health problems and the diverse network of advocates who are fighting to solve them.
Practically speaking, the Central Valley is all but invisible to those who live outside it. Over the course of the twentieth century, legislators and growers turned this 500-mile-long stretch of land into one of the most intensively farmed regions in the world, watered by one of the world’s most ambitious irrigation systems. Although California leads the nation in agricultural production, many Californians have little sense of what goes on in the agricultural regions of their state. This invisibility helps to explain why California has located two of the state’s three hazardous-waste landfills and many of its prisons there, while also continuing to allow high levels of toxicity in the air and water.
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I’ve got an article coming out today in the inaugural edition of the new UC Press journal Boom: A Journal of California. I wrote it with one of my Master’s advisors from UC Davis, Julie Sze. I’m excited because Boom is designed to be a cross-over publication read by scholars and the general public alike, so among other things, it looks beautiful and some of the articles are available for free online (hard-copies are also for sale in some news outlets and bookstores). The editors also tried to make it “count” for academic contributors by putting it through the usual scholarly peer review process. I wish this new publication every success and hope to see more like it in the future!
I’m sure it must cheer Kettleman City families that Kings County has been given $158, 000 to develop a program to improve birth outcomes using grant money from the company that runs the hazardous waste dump three miles out of town. Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the parent company of Chem Waste, wants their PR donation to create a two-year “preconception program” for women in the county, said Keith Winkler, King County’s health director.
“Company employees are part of the Kettleman City community, prompting the company to seek ways to help it.” Aw, that’s sweet.I am told that only two Kettleman City residents are employed by Chem Waste Management, Inc. It’s not exactly a company town.
The county will develop educational materials to be handed out at schools, health fairs and to doctors and health providers in the community to make available to patients. These pamphlets and educational materials will educate women and adolescents about how their health can affect any future babies. Things like not smoking and drinking, safe sex, and the like. These are startling new health discoveries that I’m sure will be news to Kettleman City families.
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