Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Glenn Hurowitz

To offshore drilling advocates, the oil-soaked birds washing up on the Gulf shore are a regrettable sacrifice in our pursuit of a higher calling: energy independence. Oil is a nasty business, they admit, but to them, offshore drilling is better than continuing to buy our oil from hostile countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

They imply that we have a choice between dirty bombs and dirty oil.

Nothing could be further from the truth: offshore drilling has never and will never make us less reliant on Saudis, Iranians, or Venezuelans. Whether we like it or not, oil from those countries is cheaper and in many ways cleaner than oil from deep under the sea—and until that changes, Americans are going to continue to use it.

A lot of that is because of basic geology. It’s easy to get oil out of the Saudi desert and other parts of the Middle East. Middle Eastern oil tends to sit in immense, highly concentrated pools close to the surface. Even though many Saudi oil fields have been in production for decades, there’s still loads of oil left. More oil comes from a single Saudi field, the Ghawar, than every country except the United States and Russia—even though Ghawar has been in production since 1951.

In the United States, however, all the cheap oil is gone. We’ve been sucking it out of the ground for a hundred years. Pretty much all that’s left is way down deep under the sea or in highly depleted wells that only wildcatters will drill. It’s unpredictable, exploration frequently comes up dry, and because it requires sticking so many holes in the ground, accidents are more likely. Scraping what’s left out of the ground and bringing it to gas stations is dangerous and costly.

Although oil companies are notoriously chary about sharing their production costs, the International Energy Agency recently published the results of a global survey based on published data and leaks from industry insiders.

Source: International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2008 (28 July 2009)

What they found was unsurprising to oil industry insiders. Given the easily accessible geology and the still-plentiful supplies, Saudi oil clocks in at just four to six dollars per barrel, with similar costs for other sources of Middle Eastern oil like Iran and Iraq. With relatively mature fields, Venezuelan oil costs about $20.

But it still beats out oil from the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore areas of the United States, which cost a comparatively whopping $32 to $65 dollars per barrel to produce, according to the IEA. Even when you throw in transportation costs of about two dollars a barrel to get oil from the Persian Gulf to the United States, Saudi oil is still just a quarter of the cost of offshore U.S. oil.

What this means is that no matter how many wells we drill in the sea floor, we’re not going to displace Middle Eastern oil. On the world market, buyers will always snap up the cheap, easy to get Saudi oil first and only then turn to whatever dregs come from America. It’s for this reason that when the price of oil plummets, domestic drilling operations become uneconomical and shut down, while the Saudis just keep on pumping.

At best, additional offshore drilling will displace other domestic sources of oil like the Alaskan Arctic and marginal Texan fields, and perhaps Canada’s tar sands, all of which cost even more than Gulf oil to get out of the ground.

As long as we’re using oil, it may not be such a bad thing to get so much of it from the Middle East, at least from an environmental perspective. Because the oil there occurs in such high concentrations, it requires far fewer holes to extract the same amount, dramatically reducing the risk of something going wrong. Even when there are spills, they have far fewer environmental consequences. It goes without saying that the mostly lifeless Arabian desert is not an ecologically sensitive fishery or Alaska’s wildlife rich coastal plain.

Of course, that doesn’t exactly make Middle Eastern oil clean, either. Burning it still produces enormous amounts of carbon pollution and buying it still funnels money to terrorist-friendly regimes.

So what are we to do? First, we have to recognize the truth that because of the economics, whether we like it or not, the last drop of oil our country burns will be Saudi oil.

So the way to end our reliance on oil in the Middle East isn’t to boost production of expensive and risky oil domestically – it’s to end our reliance on oil period. That means capping carbon pollution, raising fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and investing in clean energy technology.

If we move aggressively to achieve that vision, one day soon we can celebrate the burning of our last drop of oil. It may be Saudi, but it will still be the last.

 

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by Bonnie Azab Powell

(Watershed Media)In what is ostensibly a five-book review for the June 10 New
York Review of Books, journalist Michael Pollan has an epic essay charting the
emergence and character of the food movement. Or, as he puts it,
“movements.” They are unified, for now at least, by little more than the
recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform, “because its
social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too
high.” (Pollan, of course, has been indispensable to the rise of this movement, even though he omits his 2006 best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, from his
list of its catalysts—among them Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Marion
Nestle’s Food Politics.)

This collection is a “big, lumpy
tent,” says Pollan:

Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes
on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics,
the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy
that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch
reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against
genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food;
efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the
principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies
rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety
regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on
campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have
access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in
schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the
various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

Yep, that about covers it. And those factions don’t always
play nicely together. For example, animal-rights activists can’t abide what I like to call
the “born-again carnivores”—the people (like me) who used to be vegetarians
but resumed eating meat once they could get it in good (or at least
better) conscience from small farms.

Pollan finds one common point on which all the various
movement splinters can agree: that the way our food system is organized and
supported in this country has led to an epidemic of ill health. First Lady
Michelle Obama’s various forays into food politics shows just that there is awareness of that fact occurs in very high places. But the food
movement isn’t just about tearing down the unhealthy, unfair, and unclean
industrial food system, says Pollan. It’s also about celebrating the communal and gustatory
pleasures of its opposite—and that’s what makes the food movement so appealing. Farmers
markets aren’t just outlets for organic kale; they’re the new informal
gathering places to meet and make friends. They make food shopping fun again, no longer a grim sprint behind a cold
metal cart through aisles of corporate logos.

In the final part of the essay, while discussing
political scientist Janet A. Flammang’s new book, The Taste for
Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, Pollan takes aim at a
favorite target: the corporate message that cooking is a chore and convenience food can rescue us from it. Fast food and convenience food,
writes Flammang, along with other tactics to denigrate “‘foodwork’—everything
involved in putting meals on the family table,” have wrecked the critical social institution of
the family meal, and other important food rituals, such as the
breaking of bipartisan bread that used to occur in the Senate dining room.

Reclaiming
cooking and communal eating as worthy societal activities are just two goals
the various factions of the food movement can agree on. They’ll need to find
more common ground if they hope to persuade politicians—and the rest of the country—that theirs is a cause worth backing.

 

 

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Courtesy Billg1 via PicasaHere’s a late Bike to
Work Day post. OK it’s a glorified retweet of Ezra Klein’s three-paragraph story about giving up his car in D.C., which is worth reading. Here’s the last
two-thirds:

The debate over auto ownership is unfortunately moralistic
when, in my experience, the realities of auto ownership are almost entirely
decided by infrastructure. Left for LeDroit, an excellent blog covering my
neighborhood, makes the point well in a recent post: Cities
and neighborhoods built before the advent of car culture tend to be pretty easy
to navigate without a car, and as you can see in the graph above, a lot of the
people who live in them tend to not own cars. Conversely, cities that were
built after cars became the norm essentially require their residents to own
cars and their residents comply.

In practice, this doesn’t feel like a decision imposed by
the cold realities of infrastructure. We get attached to our cars. We get
attached to our bikes. We name our subway systems. We brag about our short
walks to work. People attach stories to their lives. But at the end of the day,
they orient their lives around pretty practical judgments about how best to
live. If you need a car to get where you’re going, you’re likely to own one. If
you rarely use your car, have to move it a couple of times a week to avoid street
cleaning, can barely find parking and have trouble avoiding tickets, you’re
going to think hard about giving it up. It’s not about good or bad or red or
blue. It’s about infrastructure.

The point for sustainable
transportation types is that focusing on infrastructure—safe, pleasant bikeways—matters
more than focusing on individual behavior.

Bike to Work
Day is still helpful, though, for normalizing bike commuting. Bringing riders
together shows them—and others who see them—that it’s a common thing to do in a
lot of places, not a fringe activity.

For the record, I biked
in today, but I was only in it for the SmartWool sock giveaway in my
neighborhood. I’m not as hardcore as my friend Andrew, who was photographed at Seattle’s most dangerous biking intersection for a story on the dangers of biking in Seattle.

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by David Roberts

Imagine you’re 15 years old. You and your best friend have just gotten stoned for the first time, you’re laying around his rec room. Your shoes are off, the sun is shining through the windows,  you’re listening to metal albums. You start to notice that in every song there’s that one part: The Awesome Part. The music accelerates, or crescendos, or shifts suddenly, and you look at each other and say, “That. Was. Awesome.” Then, because you’re stoned, you vow to some day make an album of all awesome parts. Just awesome parts, strung together by mad kickassology scientists into a tapestry of pure ***ing awesomeness! Then you go back to munching on Cheez-Its.

Except these five guys from Rhode Island went and did it. Fang Island’s eponymous debut is an album of all awesome parts, a sound they hilariously describe as “everyone high-fiving everyone.” I would call it joyous metal, and I won’t lie: it’s an acquired taste. It can be overwhelming, like doing keg stands with Gatorade. But I can’t get enough.

Consider this song, “Sidewinder.” It starts as a speedmetal chug. About 1:35 in, it becomes a triumphant chant. Then at around 2:15 it becomes a melodic riff, and then at 3:00 … the harmonized twin-guitar attack! To top things off, around 3:45, a towering metal squeal. All awesome parts. Turn it up.

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by Todd Paglia

Boreal forest in Canada—safe from chainsaws for now.Photo: ForestEthicsMy first
job in the social change movement was working for Ralph Nader.  I was a
lawyer, one of Nader’s Raiders.  Not in the ‘70s when it was cool and
people actually knew what that was, but in the ‘90s, when it was decidedly not
cool and my mother was sure I had lost my mind.  I left my high-paying K
Street law firm to make less than half as much, traded my fancy office for a
dingy cubical with walls made from boxes of books and stacks of old newspapers.
 What other evidence of my insanity did my mother, who grew up poor in
upstate New York, need?

Like many Americans, I am not fond of large concentrations of unaccountable
power. And in my work as a young lawyer, I was out to get The Man.  For
me, that meant big companies.  They exert far too much control over our
government, gamble our money (the “free market”), expect our tax dollars to
bail them out (“too big to fail”), deceive us about the effects their products
have on our health (are cell phones the new tobacco?), and mislead us with
greenwash.  I could go on …

All of which makes it more surprising that my work now, while still challenging
big companies, involves an awful lot of collaborations with those same beasts.

This week ForestEthics, Canopy,
Greenpeace Canada, and our
allies, along with some of the biggest logging companies in the boreal forests
of Canada, announced
the largest conservation initiative in history.  The stats are
mind-boggling: nearly 70 million acres of woodland caribou habitat, an area the
size of Colorado, off limits to logging for three years, while 175 million
acres, an area the size of Texas, go into a comprehensive land-use planning
process. That’s a fancy term meaning a process that determines which areas must
be permanently protected, and which areas can be logged in a selective and
sustainable manner.

This matters for a lot more than just caribou.  These forests are so
immense that the clean air and pure water they produce keep millions of people
healthy and provide tens of thousands of jobs.  Beyond that, the 186
billion tons of carbon stored in Canada’s boreal forests is equivalent to 27
years’ worth of global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
 We need to keep as much of these forests standing as possible—for all
of us.

We have a truce with the logging industry, but neither side of this agreement
makes the final decisions here: that is up to First Nations governments and
provincial governments in Canada.  In other words, our truce is
subservient to the aboriginal and provincial authorities that control the
actual land base.  This is a key underpinning of the accord.

How did we get to this point?  

Many
players have toiled away for many years to research the science, create the
funding, and support seemingly endless negotiations that were often held
together by just a thread.  Our part in creating this historic initiative
has been bringing the power of the U.S. marketplace to the table. And we’ve
done that side-by-side with Canopy and Greenpeace Canada.

With half of Canada’s boreal forests being logged to make paper, and much of
that going to feed the U.S.‘s insatiable demand, pressuring big paper consumers
like Victoria’s Secret, Scholastic, and Kimberly-Clark to steer clear of the
boreal and demand greener options was critical.  In fact, that pressure was one of the primary drivers of
this agreement.

Canopy, for example, has led a quiet revolution in book, magazine, and
newspaper publishing by greening some of the largest-selling publishers and
titles in the world, including the Harry Potter juggernaut. Greenpeace Canada
waged a hard-hitting campaign against Kimberly-Clark for using old growth
boreal trees to make toilet paper—and more importantly, they both forged a
solution to their conflict with a better balance between environmental and
financial matters.  At ForestEthics, we have been working not only to
shift Victoria Secret’s massive paper purchases away from boreal caribou
habitat, but also doing the same with some of the largest buyers of paper in
the world: Staples, Office Depot, FedEx Office, and literally dozens of other
Fortune 500 companies.  

All of this pressure—hundreds of millions of dollars of purchasing power—over  the course of many years was aimed at creating a space for a real
negotiation. And two years ago it started: The leader of the Forest Products
Association of Canada basically asked then ForestEthics Campaign Director
Tzeporah Berman what it would take for the market pressure to go away.
 Our reply:  A lot.  So it began.

And still, even after this deal has been reached, we’re at the beginning, not
the end. The boreal is not “saved,” but there is a framework in place that may
just succeed in protecting some of the most critical areas of this globally
important forest. While outreach began with First Nations and provincial
governments months ago, a lot of work is needed to collaborate on land-use
decisions for this agreement to move forward.

Our work on this issue started in 2001.  Without some of the largest
companies in the world lending their purchasing power toward a greener
direction for the boreal, we would not be here today.  Quite a few of
these companies had to be pressured into moving more quickly—but to their
credit, they were able to move past their conflicts with activist groups toward
real collaboration.   And many more companies wanted to be part of
this change from the beginning, and used their market power to great effect.
 

So here I am, 15 years after signing up as one of Nader’s Raiders, and I am
still swimming in a sea of corporate power.  I have come to better
understand the people at these companies.  It shouldn’t have been a
shocking discovery, but I learned that we share some key core values.  I
didn’t believe that back in 1995.  

I know there will be challenges reaching our goals, and much of this depends
upon decisions that will ultimately be made by aboriginal and provincial
governments. And the pressure from big paper-buying companies wanting green
products that helped get us to this point will be even more essential to
getting this deal done.

Corporate power is still all too often used to benefit the few at the expense
of the rest of us. But it is nice to know that at times it can be applied
toward the greater good.

Related Links:

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Are Congressional
Republicans moving beyond blanket opposition to the Obama administration? Here’s
an interesting signal: Four GOP House members signed a letter praising
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood for putting bikers and walkers on equal footing with autos in transportation
planning.

Reps. Cathy McMorris
Rodgers (WA), Michael McCaul (TX), Jack Kingston (GA), and Steven LaTourette
(OH) joined 24 Democratic colleagues in giving a shout-out to LaHood’s
newsmaking policy shift:

We recognize, and appreciate, that your statement was not
about providing equal amounts of funding to all forms of transportation, or
prioritizing bicycling and walking over other transportation modes such as
trucking, freight or public transit. Instead, your commitment to consider all
modes clarified that to give citizens a choice, rather than forcing them into
their car, we must make sure that bicycling and walking are as safe and
convenient as other modes. [Full text]

We’ve reported on LaHood’s March statement the auto-only era of federal transportation planning
is finished. (“People across America who value bicycling should have a voice
when it comes to transportation planning,” he said.)

He drew a flurry
of comments from ticked-off reps in auto and transport industries, so it’s
encouraging that these GOP lawmakers are taking a more nuanced view.

Oh, and happy Bike to
Work Day, y’all.

(Hat tip to Elena Schor
at
Streetsblog.)

 

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Texas oil companies are funding an attack on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature environmental accomplishment, the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act.Gov. Schwarzenegger’s OfficeBig Oil is nothing if
not brazen, so while BP works to protect its tattered reputation in the Gulf,
two Texas oil companies are on the attack in California. Their target is Assembly Bill 32, the most
ambitious cap-and-trade climate plan in the nation, which was signed into law
by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) in 2006 and is set to really kick into gear
next year. Their weapon is a ballot initiative that would mothball the plan
until state unemployment drops to below 5.5 percent for four consecutive
quarters (from a current 12.6 percent), which would effectively kill the plan
for the time being.

Last week, a group
turned in 800,000 signatures in support of the initiative, ensuring it a place
on state ballots in November. Texas refinery companies Tesoro and Valerog an attack on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature and
private donors have poured more than $1 million into the campaign. Clean-air
advocates worry that figure could reach $50 million by year’s end.

The group works under
the name California Jobs Initiative,
which is ironic given the threat it poses to jobs in the state’s growing
cleantech industry. The clean-energy sector has noticed the threat, and it’s partnering with green groups and venture capital firms to build up its own war chest to
defend the climate plan.

Schwarzeneger, for his
part, has stuck to his guns: “We have to do everything we can to fight
back and push back those greedy companies and make sure we protect our
environmental laws,” he
said last week.

Two ways this could
play out:

Worst-case scenario: Defeat. A successful ballot initiative would
be catastrophic, and not just for clean-energy workers in California. The fight
is a symbolic proxy for the national battle over fossil-fuel pollution and
climate legislation, and a victory for polluters in the nation’s most populous state
would embolden them to try to repeal climate plans in other states.

“People see
California as ground zero in this fight,” Ann Nothoff, California advocacy
director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the L.A. Times. “Polluters will do
anything to defeat climate legislation in Washington, D.C., even if it means
using California as a pawn.”

Best-case scenario: A long, expensive distraction. Even if the
measure fails six months from now, it still forces environmental groups to
spend scarce money and attention on defending an existing law when they want to be proactively campaigning for more progress.

In this way it works
the same as concerted attacks on climate science or climate action plans.
Polluters don’t have to win public
arguments over science or the best climate solutions. They just have to
continue attacking, keeping the public confused and the media covering the
“debate.” For them, the best defense is relentless series of attacks.
Clean-energy advocates are stuck playing defense.

The silver lining: Cleantech gets tough. If there’s a bright side
here, it’s that California’s politically inexperienced clean-energy companies
and venture firms may learn to use their considerable funds and intellectual
capital in the political arena. In February, cleantech executives traveled to Washington
for a “fly-in” crash
course on lobbying and media strategy. The attack on California’s climate
plan could hammer home some of the same lessons on the need for businesses to
engage with policy. Now Climatewire
reports that cleantech firms and environmental groups are working to craft
a unified response plan to the oil-company attacks. Both groups may emerge
stronger from that partnership.

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by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—The U.S. agency that regulates offshore
drilling was broken up into three separate agencies Wednesday as part of a move
to end cozy industry relationships exposed by the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster,
officials said.

The shake-up
came a day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told lawmakers the Minerals
Management Service, which issued lucrative offshore exploration leases and was
also responsible for enforcing safety rules, needed to be cleaned up.

The MMS was
severely criticized for being lax on safety after explosions sent a BP-leased
offshore oil rig to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, unleashing a catastrophic
oil spill.

President Barack
Obama ordered “top to bottom” reform of the agency after it was
accused of allowing BP and other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without
first obtaining required permits.

Salazar broke
MMS into three separate agencies, each independent of the other and handling
one of the three missions once handled by the agency.

The first of the
three new agencies, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, will be responsible
for developing offshore energy resources, both renewable and conventional, and
will be in charge of leasing activities.

The new Bureau
of Safety and Environmental Enforcement will be responsible for safety and
environmental protection in offshore energy activities, and will have the
authority to levy penalties on violators.

The third new
agency, the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, will collect and distribute
revenues generated by activities including oil and gas exploration, coal
mining, and renewable energy resources.

 

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Rand Paul’s Copenhagen rant and other election notes

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by Ashley Braun

AFPEager to show your full support for urban farming, ladies? Then try this over-the-shoulder rice-paddy holder: a bra that double A’s a pot to grow rice, complete with irrigation system (the watering hose is a belt that holds seedlings). The concept was inspired by the recent boom of interest in boob food security.

It’s not Victoria’s secret that the maker, Japanese lingerie company Triumph, has a history of busting out unique bras. Its line-up has frequently stayed abreast with environmental issues, having offered bras with a place to keep reusable chopsticks, with solar panels, and with the ability to hold the weight of those melons you just picked up at the farmers market.

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by KC Golden

This piece was co-authored by Ross Macfarlane.

Sens. Kerry (D-Mass) and Lieberman (I-Conn) finally
released
the American Power Act (APA) on Wednesday, May 11, after
months of
internal negotiations, and nearly a year after the House passed its
comprehensive climate and energy bill, (the American Clean Energy
and
Security Act or ACES). Climate Solutions is still reviewing its
nearly 1000
pages, and will be developing more detailed responses and priorities for
our
advocacy work. But we wanted to provide
some high level reactions to our friends and supporters, and highlight
some of
the areas that we will be working on to strengthen and improve. We will
be updating you on our thoughts, and
would appreciate hearing yours.

At the end of this memo, we have included a list of sources we have
used
for our initial analysis which includes good resources for those who
would like
more details on the APA’s provisions. We
want to single out the great work by Eric
  De Place at Sightline, who also helped us with our
briefing call for key business and community leaders.

We will continue working for the strongest possible bill that limits
global warming pollution, reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, and
accelerates innovation and investment in clean and efficient energy. 
Our advocacy focuses on mobilizing our
efforts and friends to fight for the best policy possible, incorporating
the
strongest provisions from a number of bills and policy proposals into
the final
product. We are particularly
appreciative of the tremendous contributions of Sens. Cantwell and
Collins
in the CLEAR Act, and believe their focus on a simple, fair approach is
having
a positive influence as the Senate moves forward. 

A note on the spirit of these comments, and the difficult
situation we face as advocates for real climate solutions: 
Like every piece of major legislation in our
somewhat dysfunctional political system, this one will bear the scars of
fear-based special interest politics and insufficient ambition. We will
keep fighting hard for what’s right
and necessary, while understanding (at the risk of echoing Sec.
Rumsfeld) that
we have to go to the policy field with the Congress we’ve got. In every
major climate bill that sees the
light of day, we can expect (without condoning) big problems; but there
are few
problems bigger than continuing to fail to respond to the climate
crisis. If we can find a way to move in a positive
direction, we need to move. This may
well include provisions of the APA as well as other bills, including the
CLEAR
Act. We’re focused on the destination
more than the vehicles.

Our first cut on the American Power Act’s provisions:

Limiting global warming pollution

Our top priority for comprehensive climate
and clean energy legislation is that it puts us firmly on the path to
rapidly
reducing fossil fuel dependence and building a strong clean energy
economy. Science-based limits on global
warming pollution are an essential foundation for that policy. We
need a declining cap on emissions to
send clear market signals that accelerate deployment and unlock
innovation in
clean and efficient energy solutions and to responsibly address the
climate
crisis. 

The APA establishes reduction targets for
covered sources of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. While
these reductions are not steep enough,
especially in the near-term, they do track with President Obama’s
commitments
in Copenhagen,
ACES, and other proposals considered in Congress. The bill includes
provisions which allow
adjustment of the targets to the best available science. What is
scientifically necessary may not yet
be politically possible. We will continue to advocate for doing the
whole job.

Because of the central importance of the
emissions cap, we elaborate on it more than other features:

Structure of the cap

The bill takes a somewhat different approach than ACES (or other
legislative proposals)—a “sectoral” approach rather than an
economy-wide cap
or trading system. It establishes caps
that are phased in for four primary sectors—electricity generation,
industrial
sources, natural gas, and petroleum-based fuels. Together, these sectors
account for
approximately 85 percent of national emissions. Electrical utilities and petroleum based transportation fuels are
covered starting in 2013, and the largest industrial emitters and
natural gas
companies are phased in beginning in 2016.

For transportation, the bill requires the petroleum companies to
purchase allowances for the carbon emissions caused by their fuels at a
price
set by the market for other sources. The
transportation sector is directly subject to the declining cap on carbon
emissions, and oil companies will pay a price set by the market for
these
permits.

Eric De Place at Sightline has a
good description of how this works. 

Offsets

Our biggest concern with the emissions reduction provisions in the
bill
relates to the excessive amount of offsets that are available (2 billion
tons
annually). This is not new or unique to this bill—these provisions are
largely unchanged from the ACES bill—but they do pose a significant
threat to
the integrity of the cap. The bill does establish oversight and
accountability
provisions that generally improve on the international standards and
ACES.
International offsets would be limited and
discounted (1.25 tons of international offsets are required for every
ton of
emissions covered). 

We strongly support projects that reliably store carbon or reduce
emissions in uncapped sectors like agriculture.
But they should not be used to excuse or “offset” a large proportion of
the energy sector emissions within the cap. And two billion tons is just
too much—enough to substantially
undermine the incentives for technology innovation and deployment in the
core
energy sectors. We’ll be advocating a
reduced scope for offsets and strong oversight to ensure they are
legitimate
and effective.

Market protections

The bill contains extensive provisions that limit the ability of
traders
to manipulate the market. It limits auction participation to the
companies that
are required to have permits. It also protects against synthetic
derivatives. The bill incorporates some
of the strong market protection provisions of Sen. Cantwell’s CLEAR
Act as
well as other efforts to better regulate markets. Again, Eric DePlace has
a very good description of the market
protection provisions and his opinion that they constitute an
improvement over
previous bills.

Price collars

As a method to reduce price volatility, the bill contains both a
ceiling
and floor on the price of carbon credits (which both escalate over the
period
of the reductions) and establishes a strategic reserve to reduce the
likelihood
that hitting the ceiling will “break the bank” by requiring EPA to issue
additional permits above the levels allowed by the cap. We oppose a
price ceiling, because it could
allow emissions in excess of the cap. At
minimum, we believe the ceiling should be higher and should escalate
more
rapidly to minimize the likelihood of exceeding the emission limits in
the
bill.  

Allocation of allowances

As in ACES, many of the emission allowances are distributed without
charge in the early years to electric and natural gas utilities, with
provisions requiring the value to be distributed to ratepayers to reduce
rate
impacts and promote energy efficiency (note:  the efficiency provisions
are a bit unclear
yet, and may not have the intended effect). 75 percent of the allowances would be distributed based on historical emissions
and 25 percent based on the load served (ACES had a 50/50 split). The bill also
follows ACES in allowing free
distribution in the initial years to trade-sensitive industries. A
substantial percentage of allowances are
allocated for public purposes, such as support for state programs,
deficit
reduction, protection of low income consumers, and transit projects that
reduce
GHGS (this transit and other “smart growth” funding is new and welcome
in the
APA—the kind of legitimate, carbon-reducing public purpose that merits
public
investment much more than, say, provisions that shift financial risk
from nuclear
operators to taxpayers.)

Over time, the percentage of free allowances will decline and the
amount
auctioned will increase. After 2026, an
increasing percentage of allowances will go to a trust fund which will
rebate
75 percent directly to households and allocate 25 percent to deficit reduction.

Climate Solutions has always
advocated an auction-based system and will continue to push for
transparency,
equity, and efficiency. The sky is a
public resource, and any proceeds from the private use of that resource
belong
to the public. It is important to
remember, however, that the allocation system does not directly affect
the
market signals or emission limits that are established by the declining
cap.

Consumer protection

As noted above, the bill provides significant protections through
utility rebates and (in the later years) direct refunds. It also
provides direct refunds for
low-income consumers who would be disproportionately affected by any
cost
increases and have done the least to cause global warming. We
strongly support
having good provisions that ensure that basic energy service is
affordable to
all.

The Clean Air Act and EPA authority

One of the areas of intense debate and concern is how new climate
policy
would affect EPA’s existing authorities to regulate climate pollution.
The carbon reduction provisions of APA are a
title of the Clean Air Act and would mark the first significant
expansion of
that Act since the 1990 Amendments (which established the Acid Rain
Program). EPA would be the entity primarily responsible
for implementation of the program. 

However, APA would reduce CAA authority in one key area: major
stationary sources. This is essentially the same approach taken
in the 1990 Amendments—when Congress replaced individual source
permitting
approaches with a sectoral cap. The APA
also establishes performance standards for coal-fired power plants built
after
2020, and allows EPA to set performance standards for older power
plants. It
would preserve existing Clean Air Act authority over mobile-source
emissions of
global warming pollution and other types of air pollution.   

We will be advocating for stronger preservation of EPA’s
existing authority, especially for the largest and dirtiest sources.
Some changes to existing authority are likely
given the scope of new authorities in the legislation, but it’s
imperative that
we emerge overall with a much more effective national commitment to
regulate
climate pollution.

State authorities

The APA appropriately allows states to retain most of their authority
to
regulate global warming pollution and promote clean and efficient
energy. The one major exception involves state cap-and-trade programs, like the one implemented in the Northeast States and
proposed in the Western States under the Western Climate Initiative,
which
would be preempted. States that have
implemented caps will get financial compensation for their lost
revenues. In the House bill, these programs were
suspended. While we prefer the House approach (or no preemption at all)
we will
likely be focusing our efforts on preserving the Bill’s broad retention
of
state authority and pushing for better funding and support for state
programs. This is likely to be an
area of continuing contention, and maintaining the ability for leading
states
to serve as pioneers and innovators is vital to our continuing progress.

Renewable energy and energy efficiency

APA’s energy efficiency and renewable energy provisions (standards
and
funding) are substantially weaker than ACES. In part, the reason is jurisdictional. In the House, a single committee
developed the energy and climate
portions of the bill. In the Senate, by
contrast, different committees have jurisdiction. The Senate Energy
committee
reported a bill (the American Clean Energy Leadership Act or ACELA) last
June,
that contains provisions on these issues, but they are generally much
weaker
than the comparable provisions of ACES. For example, ACELA contains a
national Renewable Power Standard that is weaker than what many experts predict will be achieved in a business as usual
scenario, without any new policy. 

We do note the addition of a Rural Energy
Savings Program, authored by Sen. Merkley, that will provide
substantial
efficiency benefits in rural communities. Energy efficiency and
renewable energy standards remain a critical
piece of any successful emission reduction and clean energy job creation
strategy; strengthening provisions will be a major focus for us.

The APA also contains far less financial support for state programs
that
promote energy efficiency and renewables than ACES. According to the
American Council For An
Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), APA only provides one quarter of the
state
funding for efficiency programs as ACES and much less funding
for gas utility programs to benefit consumers. ACEEE has estimated that
the House bill would save the average American
consumer $200 on their energy bills. One
issue that we will have to look at more closely, though, is the
potential
trade-offs between these funding mechanisms for state programs and
consumer
protection. For a variety of reasons,
the Senate Bill allocates less public funding overall, so the tradeoffs
become
somewhat more difficult. Since we
strongly support both clean energy and consumer protection, we need to
advocate
for solutions that provide adequate funding without “robbing Peter to
pay
Paul.” One obvious place to look for this funding is the extensive
giveaways to
dirty energy, discussed below.  

In addition to these examples, there are many important policies that
will promote energy efficiency and renewables that should be amended
into this
bill or adopted separately. These
include nationwide building codes, appliance and equipment efficiency
standards,
provisions to accelerate home and building efficiency (such as HOME STAR
and
BUILDING STAR), research and development support, renewal and expansion
of
incentive programs established under ARRA, and clean energy financing.
Many of these provisions were contained in
the House bill, and should be considered as part of a final package. A
number of the leading associations
representing renewable and energy efficiency businesses issued a joint
statement last month highlighting a number of areas that they believe
should be
included in a comprehensive climate and energy bill. 

Dirty energy giveaways

Presumably in an effort to find a path to 60 votes, the APA contains
unwarranted and inefficient subsidies to dirty, risky, and expensive
energy
sources. Nuclear power gets more than
$50 billion in federal loan guarantees, along with risk protection, cost
recovery
and streamlining/elimination of critical environmental and regulatory
reviews. Taxpayers should not be asked
to shoulder huge financial and other risks for a well-established
technology
like nuclear. And Senators who support
fiscal discipline and oppose big government should be the last to insist
on
such provisions.

The APA contains a large program to demonstrate carbon capture and
sequestration for coal plants. While we
support research into CCS, the amounts of money involved perpetuate a
huge
investment in coal fired generation, well in advance of any solid
evidence that
a cost-effective solution for disposing of carbon emissions is at
hand. We will advocate redirection of these
subsidies to clean energy sources that entail less risk and greater
public
benefit.

Offshore drilling

The recent disaster in the Gulf graphically illustrates the costs of
our
addiction to fossil fuels. The APA provisions on this issue are clearly a
work
in progress, and are being amended to respond to the enormous public
sentiment
and concerns from coastal state senators. On the one hand, the bill provides a financial incentive (revenue
sharing) for states that open their coastline to offshore drilling. On
the other hand, the bill provides veto
opportunities for states that would be affected by spills, and
institutes some
other protections. 

Climate Solutions has joined with
other groups in calling for a ban on new offshore drilling, at least
until a
full review of the Gulf disaster has been completed. We also support
the efforts of the Senators
in Washington, Oregon,
and California to ban drilling off our states,
as well as a stop to drilling in the sensitive and extremely hazardous
environments of the Beaufort and Chukchi
Seas off arctic Alaska.  Expanded fossil fuel exploration has no place in a climate bill,
since it demonstrably promotes increased emissions. And in the wake of
the Gulf oil disaster,
these provisions may well cost the bill more votes than it attracts.

Conclusion and recommendations for strengthening

The American Power Act is much less than we need and much more than
we
currently have for a national climate policy. It would, for the first time, establish a flawed but significant
national commitment to climate solutions. Given the ticking clocks of
climate change, the threats to our national
security, and the race to compete in the global clean energy economy, we
must
do everything possible to get the best possible bill enacted now. And
there are few signs that our
dysfunctional political system is going to make meaningful change easier
in the
next session or near future.

We urge the Senate to pass the strongest possible climate
and clean energy bill this year. Initial
priorities for strengthening the APA include:

Stronger and more certain emission limits, including
stronger near-term targets, provisions to limit the quantity and quality
of
offsets, and a price collar that preserves the integrity of the cap.
Stronger
energy efficiency and renewable energy
standards and funding, with a significant change in the balance of
investment
from higher cost, dirtier technologies to cleaner ones with greater
public
benefit and less risk.
Preserving and enhancing key
regulatory authorities of
EPA and the states. 

So the APA is clearly a mixed bag. But we’re going to keep fighting—creating the political space for what
we need, and pushing the Senate to do more than it appears to believe it
can. We hope you’ll join us.

Related Links:

Outcomes, not mechanisms: the effects of the American Power Act

Friedman nails Obama for his timid response to the “environmental 9/11”

The American Power Act and California’s AB 32

by Jonathan Hiskes

Climate and energy
issues barely registered in this month’s primary coverage, but Rand Paul (son of
Ron) saw fit to take on the Copenhagen climate talks after becoming the
Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky last night.

“We have a president
who went to Copenhagen and appeared with Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chávez and others—Evo
Morales—to apologize for the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “These petty
dictators say that to stop climate change it’s about ending capitalism. The president, by attending Copenhagen, gives credibility and credence to these
folks, and he should not go.”

Reality check: Obama supports
a market-based (i.e. capitalist) response to climate change—cap-and-trade. That’s
the policy he backed in Copenhagen. He joined more than 100 heads of state
there and didn’t show any love to Mugabe, Chávez, or Morales. In fact, when Bolivian
president Morales boycotted the Copenhagen Accord reached last December, Obama’s
State Department withdrew climate adaptation funding from the country.

Sounds like we can look
forward to more nuanced discussions of who’s for and against the Industrial
Revolution.

A few other notes from
last night’s election:

Paul’s victory gives
Democratic candidate Jack Conway a swinging chance in typically red Kentucky,
according to Internet
Speculation. Actually, Salon’s Alex Pareene points
out that both Conway and his Democratic opponent got more votes in Tuesday’s primary
than Paul, which suggests Kentucky isn’t entirely excited about a Paul-style libertarian
rEVOLution.
And while Conway, who currently serves as Kentucky’s attorney general, professes
his love for Kentucky coal, he sounds like he could be a potential “yes” vote for a Senate
clean-energy bill.
In Pennsylvania’s rather
conservative 12th Congressional District, Democrat Mark Critz decisively beat Republican Tim
Burns in a special election. That’s good news for Democrats but bad news for
cap-and-trade, Michael Levi notes,
as Critz loudly opposed the climate policy and professed
his love for Pennsylvania coal.
Arkansas Sen. Blanche
Lincoln failed to win a majority in the Democratic primary and faces a runoff against challenger Bill
Halter. A while back we summarized her dismal
environmental record and his blank slate on green issues.

 

Related Links:

Obama admin overhauls MMS, the agency in charge of offshore drilling

Robert Redford and green groups tell Obama to step up on Gulf oil leak

Friedman nails Obama for his timid response to the “environmental 9/11”

by Mary Bruno

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For the first 18 years of my life I lived along the final 17-mile stretch of the
Passaic River. That’s the dirty, ugly part of the river that passes through the
most crowded, industrialized part of the United States.

The
Passaic forms the western border of my home town: North Arlington, New Jersey,
a tiny borough just a few miles north of the river’s mouth in Newark. Our house
sat on a steep slope above the river. In the winter, when the oak and maple
trees were all bare, I could see the water
from our front porch. Sometimes in summer, when a flood tide overwhelmed the
river’s sluggish current, the Passaic would smell faintly of the sea.

The
Passaic was my home town river, but I didn’t have much to do with it as a kid.
I crossed over it often enough, every time we visited my mother’s family, who
lived on the other side. But I rarely played by the Passaic. I never fished it
or took a boat out on it. I certainly didn’t swim in it. I didn’t really know
the river. I just knew that it gave me the creeps.

The lower Passaic flows through the most densely populated, heavily industrialized area in the country.Photo: Mary Bruno

Like the
state it flows through, the river has a serious image problem. The Passaic is
as historic as New York’s storied Hudson, and in some places—the 77-foot-high
cascade in Paterson, for one—it is just as majestic. But most people, even
some New Jerseyites, have never heard of the
river. Those who have know it only as one of America’s most polluted waterways.
It’s hard to bond with a river like that.

The
Passaic is a poster child for rivers—for nature—everywhere. The river had
been the lifeblood of the region, the source of food and power, the playground
of the rich, the avenue of transportation, communication and commerce. The
first white settlers sailed up the Passaic in 1662 and founded Newark, the
nation’s third oldest city, on its banks. The river’s abundant charms fueled an
explosion of growth and industry that transformed the fledgling United States
into a global manufacturing powerhouse. But in time the industrial revolution
it spawned would poison and betray the Passaic. By 1952, the year I was born,
the river’s beauty and majesty were dim and distant memories. Its lower stretch
was a toxic canal. The Passaic wasn’t a source of wonder and delight, or even
interest anymore. For a whole generation, my generation, it inspired fear, revulsion,
and denial instead.

The
river wasn’t fearsome in any traditional sense. It didn’t rage or thunder. It
didn’t loll along and then suddenly turn into a boil or hurl itself over a
cliff—not this far downstream anyway. It wasn’t icy cold or booby trapped
with eddies. It wasn’t even that wide; a dog paddler like me could make it all
the way across. But the river scared us just the same. It scared us in a deep
down creepy kind of way.

We
were afraid of its impenetrable darkness. We were afraid of its industrial smell.
We were afraid of the things that lived beneath its surface and the things that
had died there. We were afraid of spotting a hand or a head bobbing in the
rafts of garbage that floated by. We were afraid
of submerged intake valves that sucked water into the factories along the
banks. We were afraid of the river’s filth. It wasn’t the kind of filth that
came from playing football with your friends. It was grownup filth. The kind
that scared the blue out of water and coated the riverbank with
oily black goo. It was the kind of filth you could taste; the kind that could
make you sick, maybe even kill you. We were afraid of getting splashed with
river water or of touching river rocks. We were afraid of falling in or of—God forbid—going under. We were afraid of the river’s anger
at being so befouled, and afraid, most of all, of the revenge we felt certain
the river would exact.

Surely,
I thought, there must be more to my home town river than the oily, garbage-strewn
slough that I remembered.

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“Our job is to make advocates of people,” said former NY/NJ Baykeeper executive director Andy Willner.Photo: Mary BrunoAndy
Willner, recently retired Executive Director of the N.Y./N.J. Baykeeper
Association, is passionate, generous, cocky, fearless, and a bit bombastic. I
love him. He says the N.Y./N.J. Metropolitan Area is a “big region” with “low
environmental self-esteem.” His mission is to awaken citizens to regional treasures
like the Passaic. He says that people don’t know the Passaic anymore, that the
river is a stranger to them, and that you can’t care about something that you
don’t know. He invited me to join him on a Passaic River boat ride.

Our
boat was a 16-foot Aqua Patio. It looked like a floating hot tub, all white
with a high freeboard and banquette seating, ideal for the civilian river trips
that the Baykeeper regularly runs up the Passaic. The two-hour tour took us
about three miles upriver, from the mouth in south Newark to the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center at the north end of downtown. It was the first time I
had ever actually been out on the Passaic.

I took
a seat in the bow with a pair of environmental engineers from Pennsylvania and
three attorneys from the Rutgers Environmental Law Center. Janice and Martin, a
retired couple from New
York, were squeezed into the stern alongside two researchers from the New York
Academy of Sciences, who were studying the ecology of New York Harbor.

Skipper
Bill Sheehan had the helm amidships. He was sturdy and gruff with a shark tooth
necklace and a bushy red moustache the color of sunset that completely obscured
his upper lip. He leaned against the gunwale, just in front of Janice, one hand
on the wheel. He had the look of a cop, or a bartender, or the ship’s captain
that he was. The look of someone who is comfortable being in charge.

Andy, our
host, was a sunnier presence. He had a full gray beard and a thick shag
of salt and pepper hair. A seafaring rabbi. A 35mm camera swung from his neck.
He used his free hand—the one that wasn’t gesticulating—to brace the camera
against his middle-aged paunch. He had made this trip upriver on many, many
occasions, but he snapped pictures with the eagerness of a first-timer. He
pointed out his favorite bridge. He marveled aloud at the play of sunlight on
the glass facades of the new office towers along the shore. Wonder lives next
to outrage in his heart.

We set
out from the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s massive sewage treatment
plant on the shores of Newark Bay. The 172-acre complex of circular tanks,
pipes, pumps and stacks processes waste for 1.3 million residents in New
Jersey’s Passaic, Bergen, Essex, and Hudson counties.

Once
we cleared the dock, Andy unfurled a nautical chart and located our position in
the labyrinth of bays, tidal inlets, islands, and marsh. Raritan Bay was below
us, linked to Newark Bay by the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait that separates New
Jersey from Staten Island. Across Newark Bay to the east lay the Meadowlands,
the vast salt marsh that is home to the Hackensack River. Above us, and well
within view, were the mouths of the Hackensack and the Passaic. The two rivers
flow down from the north and squeeze the last bite of land between them into a
chubby, muddy “V” called Point No Point before they disappear into Newark Bay.

Andy
straightened up, and with a sweep of his right arm, lassoed up the entire view.
“All these bays were much larger,” he said. “They were all extraordinary
wetlands. The Passaic was one of the most bountiful rivers in the whole system,
this estuarine stream with tributaries coming into it and a marsh system all
around it.”

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I
strained to picture the scene that Andy was describing. Like so much wild
habitat in New Jersey, the wetlands that surround Newark Bay have been
manhandled over time. In most places their transformation is so complete that
discerning the natural features of the landscape is an exercise in extreme
imagination. The once sinuous outline of Newark Bay, scalloped by coves and
inlets and the mouths of its tidal rivers and creeks, is now ruler straight
thanks to a century-long parade of large scale public and private development
projects. “You can see how geometric
the shoreline is,” said Andy, tapping the chart. “These are big fills.”

The
transformation of the Newark Meadows began in 1914 when the city of Newark,
hungry for real estate, began reclaiming the marshland along the western shore
of Newark Bay. Port Newark came first. The city dredged a mile-long shipping
channel in the bay. They mixed the dredgings with garbage and ash and heaped
the malodorous blend on top of the salt marsh until the landfill was firm
enough to support the docks and warehouses that followed. By 1974, the Newark
Meadows had completely disappeared, buried beneath the Port Newark/Elizabeth
Marine Terminal, the Newark Liberty International Airport, and the New Jersey
Turnpike. Similar landfill operations soon claimed much of the eastern shore of
Newark Bay too. Signature stands of
white fuel storage tanks now occupy acres of former salt marsh in Bayonne.
Welcome to the Garden State.

This
massive industrial footprint is the first impression that most visitors to the
state will have, certainly the millions who arrive and depart by way of Newark
airport. And it’s a lasting impression. The industrialization of the Newark Bay
marshland has done more to stereotype New Jersey than all the jokes about big
hair and the mob. Newark Airport, Port Elizabeth, the N.J. Turnpike, and the
Bayonne and Elizabeth fuel tanks are, alas, the icons of my home state.

My
fellow Aqua Patio passengers seemed unfazed by the industrial sights and
smells. Most were there on business. The environmental engineers were
reconnoitering the Passaic for a client that just bought riverfront property;
the scientists were exploring the Passaic, Hackensack and Hudson River
estuaries for a larger survey of New York Harbor; the lawyers were compiling an
inventory of structures and businesses along the Passaic. Janice and Martin
were just looking for something interesting to do on a pleasant autumn
afternoon. “Marty loves to be out on the water,” said Janice. The couple read
about the Baykeeper tours in the newspaper, and drove out from their home in Manhattan.

They
couldn’t have picked a better day. The sky was an aching, cloudless blue, the
temperature a delightful 75 degrees F. It was the kind of Indian summer evening
that can make even the Passaic River look good. And it did look good. The water
was actually blue. Its surface, miraculously free of debris, rippled and
sparkled with every breeze. The sun was slipping lower in the sky. Three
fingers from the horizon. Now two. The
light was sharp and golden. We were sailing through honey.

Shipping containers are just one of the industrial eyesores along the Passaic River in Newark.Photo: Mary BrunoWe
passed abandoned factories and rotting docks on the Newark side of the river,
and a junkyard with towers of pancaked sedans, and acres of red and blue
shipping containers stacked seven high. Backlit and spectral, each eyesore had
its own sad beauty. Together, they recalled a vanished era, the mid-19th century,
when Newark was the king of U.S. manufacturing and the banks of the Passaic
teemed with commerce.

About
three miles upriver, just north of the Benjamin Moore paint factory, we came to
the Diamond Alkali superfund site. The address, 80 Lister Avenue, is on the far
eastern edge of Newark, in the city’s historic Ironbound district. Bill
maneuvered the Aqua Patio in closer to shore, and shifted the engine into
neutral. Most of the passengers stood—to take pictures, pay respects. Diamond
isn’t the only superfund site along the Passaic, but it is by far the most
notorious. For Passaic River advocates, 80 Lister Avenue is a battle cry.

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From
1951 to 1983, the Diamond Alkali plant manufactured pesticides and weed killers
and close to a million gallons of Agent Orange, the defoliant that U.S.
military aircraft sprayed onto the jungles of South Viet Nam during the war.
The process of making Agent Orange generated huge quantities of dioxin, a
poisonous byproduct that remains the most carcinogenic substance known to man.
Diamond’s dioxin poisoned its workers, its plant site, the surrounding
neighborhood, and the river too. We were right to be afraid of the Passaic.

The six-acre, concrete grave for the remains of the Diamond Alkali plant. RIP.Photo: Mary BrunoThe
remains of the Diamond Alkali plant were entombed beneath the grey concrete
mound we floated past. It was the highlight of the tour. Fifteen feet high and
about the size of a football field, the mound was secured behind a concrete
bulkhead and a steel fence, sealed with multiple layers of clay, and capped
with an impermeable “geofabric” membrane. The mound is a six-acre grave within
which lie the remains of the deconstructed Diamond factory buildings and 932
shipping containers filled with 66,000 cubic yards of dioxin-contaminated dirt,
dust and debris that environmental cleanup crews vacuumed from the streets,
stores, schools, houses, playgrounds,
and empty lots near the property.

A few
thousand years from now, remarked Bill, archeologists studying this site will
conclude that the people of the late 20th Century “built monuments to their
pollution the way the ancient
Egyptians built monuments to their pharaohs.” With that, he kicked the engine
back in gear and we continued slowly upstream. The skyline of downtown Newark
was just ahead. Sunlight lasered off the smoked glass windows of the FBI’s new
riverside tower.

“How
come there are no other boats on the river?” asked Janice. Her face was hidden
beneath the peak of her white cotton cap, which was pulled low against the
harsh sun. It was a good question, direct and obvious, and it cut to the heart
of things. Even the poison mound and the Mad Max landscape and the occasional
doomsday commentary from Andy and Bill hadn’t managed to spoil the simple joy
of being out on the water.

My
mother would have enjoyed this boat ride. She always dreamed of living by the
water. Whenever she would mention this, my father would tease her: “You do!”
he’d say. “You live on the Passaic River.”

In a
way, he was right. There was a time when people would have coveted our home above
the river. The Passaic was valued once, even beloved. Civic leaders harnessed
its power to fuel their industrial revolution. Artists immortalized its beauty
in paintings and verse. The river’s clear, navigable waters sustained the
settlers, who farmed and fished its fertile basin, and built cities and towns,
like mine, along its banks. But those days didn’t last.

The
Passaic’s beauty had been ravaged and its bounty spent long before Janice posed
her question. The river view mansions were boarded up. Riverfront hotels shut
down. Rowing clubs disbanded. The benches in riverside parks were turned to
face the street. By the time I was born the Passaic’s lower stretch was a garbage can, a cesspool. The river was
poisoned and it was dead and even a kid like me could see it.

No one
in my large extended family ever mentioned the state of the river. No one
seemed to mourn it. The Passaic was something we crossed over or drove along,
but it was never something we engaged. The river was like an elephant in the
living room of my childhood. Its death was a ho-hum fact of life, like Friday
night shore traffic on the Garden State Parkway or Hudson County politicians on
the take. Some people must have fought for the river once. But the battle was
long over. People moved on. Like those park benches, they turned their backs on
the Passaic.

My
mother, the water dreamer, told us not to play by the river, but she didn’t
have to. How come there were no other boats on the Passaic River on this
perfect late-September afternoon? I knew
the answer to Janice’s question.

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The Passaic River at Millington Gorge.Photo: John Bruno

There
are hundreds of thousands of waterways in the continental United States, 3.5
million miles of endlessly moving liquid. How many of these waterways are
technically rivers is a rather tricky
question. “River” is not a scientific term. Indeed, science is a little laissez
fair when it comes to classifying a waterway as, say, a stream versus a river.

My
Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary defines a river as “a natural stream of
water of considerable volume.” What constitutes “considerable volume” is left
to someone else to decide.
So it’s not surprising that rivers vary greatly in size and habit. Some are
quite small; the D River in Oregon flows just 120 feet through Lincoln City to
the Pacific Ocean.  Some rivers are
massive like the wide Missouri, which at 2,450 miles is America’s longest. Some
rivers are ephemeral, surging into being after a desert downpour only to vanish
with the rain, leaving behind a lacework of empty washes that hold the promise
and threat of rushing water until the next big thunderstorm. A few rivers, like
Florida’s Kissimmee, form gigantic puddles that sheet in slow motion, like the
gentlest flood inching across a grassy sea some 40 miles wide.

Taken
together, America’s rivers drain the countryside like a giant open vascular
system that collects water from the interiors of the continent and transports
it to the seas. Their precious cargo is pirated along the way for drinking,
bathing, irrigating, recreating, and for powering millions of homes and
industries. Rivers bring life, and they can take it away too. Such is the
strange arithmetic of water: too much or too little is deadly.

Like
the Passaic, most rivers are the raison d’etre for
the communities and industries that have sprouted along their banks. There are
thousands of river towns in the U.S. – Minneapolis, St.Louis,
New Orleans, Augusta, Savannah, Albuquerque, el Paso, Cincinnati, Wheeling,
Great Falls, Bismarck, Kansas City, Sioux City, Jefferson City, Omaha, Trenton,
Toledo, Fort Wayne, Wilmington. Those are just some of the larger ones. The
Passaic spawned Newark (1666) and Paterson, N.J. (1791), two erstwhile
industrial powerhouses, as well as dozens of smaller communities like my home
town. Like most rivers, the Passaic has paid dearly for its largesse.

In
strictly physical terms, the Passaic is a fairly small river, just 90 miles
long. Nevertheless, it is New Jersey’s longest river, edging out the Raritan by
about five miles. The name Passaic means “peaceful valley” in the language of
the Lenni Lenape, the Native American tribe that occupied northern New Jersey
before the white settlers arrived.  

The
Passaic is many rivers: swift and clear in its upper stretch, sluggish and swampy
in mid-section, a thundering cascade at Great Falls, brackish below the Dundee
Dam, and so industrial in its final miles that New Jersey poet laureate William
Carlos Williams declared it “the vilest swill hole.”

The
river rises in Mendham, an historic township in north central Jersey. It heads
almost due south at first, then veers sharply north, then northeast, then due
east and then south again, making two final northward loops before emptying
into Newark Bay. This erratic path traces a sloppy, upside-down U that winds
through, over, under, and around seven New Jersey counties, 45 of its cities
and towns, three swamps, three dams, four meadows, four waterfalls, a pond, a
lake, 49 bridges and seven highways, and past countless homes, parks, playing fields,
parking lots, diners, junkyards, office buildings, shopping centers, gas
stations, warehouses, and factories. The drive from Mendham to Newark is about
30 miles. The Passaic takes the long way around.

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At 90 miles, the Passaic is the longest, crookedest, and most historic river in New Jersey. Map: Passaic River

The
Passaic’s 90-mile journey can be divided into three long stretches. The Upper
Passaic is a largely downhill romp through meadows and forest and along the
southeastern edge of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The Central
Basin is the long, flat, flood-prone mid-section
that flows north through an ancient lakebed. The Lower Valley, where I grew up,
is a 35-mile-long corridor with sides that curl like plumped pillows as it
sweeps down from the cliffs of Paterson to the sea level marshes of Newark.

In its
convoluted journey from pristine headwaters to the superfund site at its mouth,
the Passaic mirrors the triumphant and tragic relationship between nature and
industry in America. The wildness
and beauty that awed the first settlers some 400 years ago turned America into
an industrial titan. Rivers like the Passaic powered the mills, farms, and
factories that produced clothes, food, steel and electricity, a robust
international trade, and a large and solid middle class. But along the way, the
mighty frontier that helped forge American enterprise and character fell victim
to an industrial fervor that seemed, at every turn, to sacrifice natural
resources for financial gain.

The
power and much of the breathtaking natural beauty of our national mountains,
forests, rivers, and seas survives today only in the isolated patches of our
national parks, and then just barely. “Our tools are better than we are,” wrote
naturalist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 environmental classic A Sand County Almanac.
“They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice
for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without
spoiling it.” My great grandmother Emily Sullivan had a saying: “Don’t shit in
the nest.” The Passaic River is an object lesson in what can happen when we
ignore that simple, salty advice.

The
Passaic changes character in the Lower Valley. Seventeen miles upstream of the
river’s mouth in Newark Bay, the Dundee Dam crosses the river. The Passaic is
fresh water above the dam. Below, the river becomes a swirl of fresh water and
seawater whose salinity varies with conditions of weather, river flow, and ocean
tide. Water levels in the river fluctuate about five feet with each daily tide.
During extreme high tides, the Passaic can rise as much as 11 feet. When
conditions are right—a high tide during the dry summer season, for instance—the
tongue of saltwater from Newark Bay can lick the Dundee Dam, a full 17 miles
upstream.

The
Aqua Patio passengers were all quieter on the return trip, even Bill and Andy.
I wondered what they would all take away from this experience. Andy used the
Passaic River cruises to shake people up, open their eyes, confront them with
the tragedy and the possibility of the Passaic. Later that year, he would take
the mayors of Newark and Harrison out for a ride on the river. Baykeeper hosts
cruises for local business leaders, for the press and for the general public
too.

“Our
job is to make advocates of people,” said Andy. He was giving me a lift back to
my car, steering his Subaru Outback slowly along the paved streets that wind
through the PVSC plant from the riverside dock to the visitor’s parking lot at
the main entrance. “Remember Moby Dick?”
he asked, out of the blue. “The first chapter is all about Manhattan. When
industry and pollution kind of took the water away from people, the people
responded appropriately: they turned their back on the waterway and took on
other interests. Same thing with the Passaic. When
the Passaic became foul, when it was no longer a place to picnic and boat and
swim, it became less known to everyone except the people who worked on it. And
those people used it as a highway and a toilet, and when it started to smell
bad and people started to hear warnings about it, the Passaic became an unknown
place.”

I left
Andy standing in the parking lot, deep in conversation with the two
environmental engineers from the cruise. 
My maiden voyage on the Passaic River had the desired effect.  Andy would have been pleased. I didn’t get
over my fear of the Passaic. But after the boat ride that fear mingled with
curiosity and a kind of compassion. The river had touched me.

 

This is the first of a two-part excerpt from This American River: From Paradise to Superfund, Afloat on New Jersey’s Passaic.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Paddling the Passaic from its pristine beginning to its dioxin-laced end.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Whither Obama? There’s a
growing chorus calling for the president to show leadership on the BP oil disaster
by connecting it to America’s fossil-fuel dependence and the potential
of clean-energy investment.

“The silence from the
White House is deafening,” a Clinton-era White House aide told
ClimateWire. “Clearly without a White House push there does not seem
to be adequate political momentum” to pass a Senate clean-energy bill.

Today Thomas Friedman calls the Gulf leak Obama’s 9/11—the biggest opportunity of his presidency to ask
Americans to invest in nation-building clean-energy infrastructure, an opportunity he is so far squandering. I’ve
been
making the same
case.

Yesterday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, League of Conservation
Voters, and Blue Green Alliance (a labor-enviro partnership) held a press
event calling for Obama to put clean energy in the national spotlight.

And actor Robert
Redford released a cable TV ad with NRDC echoing the same message: “The Gulf
disaster is more than a terrible oil spill. It’s the product of a failed energy
policy—one that puts oil-company profits ahead of people and the environment. America needs safe,
clean and renewable energy—not more oil spills … Tell President Obama to
lead America toward a clean-energy future.”

Redford’s accompanying post spells out the situation even
more:

The American Power Act,
drafted by Senators Kerry and Lieberman, is not perfect—but it is a
significant step toward cutting our dependence on fossil fuels, limiting carbon
pollution, and encouraging businesses to shift to clean energy sources.

Unfortunately, the full Senate continues to stall—weighed down by too much infighting and too many special interests. That’s why
we need the president to assert his voice and leadership by letting the Senate—and the American people—know that he is serious about getting clean
energy and climate legislation passed this year.

Quite a spokesman, Mr.
Redford. Here’s the eye-catching ad:

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Friedman nails Obama for his timid response to the “environmental 9/11”

by Randy Rieland

These are tough times for buddies of Big Oil on Capitol
Hill. How do you stand by your men amid photos
of thick pools of oil lapping into the marshes of southern Louisiana and more video of BP pipes
gushing oil?

But love, as always, finds a way. 

In the Senate, fossil-fuel fans James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have managed
to grab hold of an issue that shows oil execs that they’ve still got their
backs: liability.

Senate Democrats Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New
Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida are pushing a proposal to raise the liability
cap on oil spills from its current paltry level of $75 million to a more
realistic $10 billion. Last week, Murkowski
blocked it. Yesterday, Inhofe did.

And he trotted out the same contorted logic Murkowski’s been
using: If you set the cap too high, you
risk putting smaller independent oil companies out of business.  Then only BP, ExxonMobil, and other oil
giants will be left, he argued.  In
short, he and Murkowski say they’re looking out for the little guys, all things
being relative.

Then things really got strange.  While testifying before the Senate’s Energy
and Natural Resources Committee, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar started
channeling Inhofe and Murkowski, saying that Congress should avoid setting
an “arbitrary” cap, and that, yes, we don’t want to hurt smaller oil companies.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), another Big Oil booster,
commended Salazar for “taking your time” on setting a cap.

All that, of course, didn’t play very well with a lot of
Democrats, starting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who
earlier in the day had said
the cap should be eliminated altogether so companies responsible for spills
would face unlimited liability.  And then
there was Nelson, who had already blasted away at a Republican idea that the
cap should somehow be tied to a company’s profits.  Here’s what he said:

For the life of me, I can’t understand someone objecting, as they are going to do, in raising an artificial limit of $75 million, up to at least $10 billion, and it’s probably going to exceed $10 billion. But the argument you’re going to hear is they are going to say, “Oh, it shouldn’t be this, it ought to be tied to profit.” Now, is it really responsible public policy to say that because of a company makes less money that it should be responsible for less damage? No.

By late in the day, the White House was trying to run damage control and
back away from Salazar’s ambiguous comments. 
It issued
a statement from Obama that condemned Republicans for playing “special
interest politics” and blocking efforts to raise the liability cap.

The world, or at least the Capitol Hill slice of it, was back in balance.

See more play-by-play from yesterday’s hearings in The
New York Times’ Green blog.

Why didn’t we think of that?

Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) has his own special take on the oil spill.  It never would have happened, he says, if we
had only gone ahead and drilled,
baby, drilled in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. 

Timing is everything

This week, the BP Sea Otter Habitat exhibit opens at the Aquarium of the
Pacific in Long Beach, Calif.  Although
the oil company donated $1 million for the facility, no BP officials are
expected to attend.  The
Los Angeles Times has the story.

Related Links:

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by David Roberts

As I’ve written before, one of the most baffling things about the BP Gulf oil disaster has been the Obama administration’s flaccid response. They’re doing everything they can to contain the spill, but they also seem to be doing everything they can to contain the American people’s anger. There’s been no effort whatsoever to channel the outrage into support for broader energy reforms. In fact, they seem to be actively working to tamp down the anger and restrict any outbreaks of ambition. “We have to put up with oil spills because we can’t live without oil.” What the hell is a Democratic administration doing pushing that message? Especially when a clean energy bill was just put forward in the Senate? It’s baffling.

In today’s New York Times, Tom Friedman absolutely nails this dynamic. He calls the oil spill “Obama’s 9/11” and laments that he seems to be blowing it, just like Bush blew his. This is the key bit:

Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have unveiled their new energy bill, which the president has endorsed but only in a very tepid way. Why tepid? Because Kerry-Lieberman embraces vitally important fees on carbon emissions that the White House is afraid will be exploited by Republicans in the midterm elections. The G.O.P., they fear, will scream carbon “tax” at every Democrat who would support this bill, and Obama, having already asked Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, feels he can’t ask them for another.

I don’t buy it. In the wake of this historic oil spill, the right policy—a bill to help end our addiction to oil—is also the right politics. The people are ahead of their politicians. So is the U.S. military. There are many conservatives who would embrace a carbon tax or gasoline tax if it was offset by a cut in payroll taxes or corporate taxes, so we could foster new jobs and clean air at the same time. If Republicans label Democrats “gas taxers” then Democrats should label them “Conservatives for OPEC” or “Friends of BP.” Shill, baby, shill.

Why is Obama playing defense? Just how much oil has to spill into the gulf, how much wildlife has to die, how many radical mosques need to be built with our gasoline purchases to produce more Times Square bombers, before it becomes politically “safe” for the president to say he is going to end our oil addiction? Indeed, where is “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act”? Why does everything have to emerge from the House and Senate? What does he want? What is his vision? What are his redlines? I don’t know. But I do know that without a fixed, long-term price on carbon, none of the president’s important investments in clean power research and development will ever scale.

I’ve criticized Friedman before over his political instincts, but this is exactly the right thing to write and the right time to write it. Kudos.

I’m sure the White House is thinking that with midterms approaching, it’s an awkward time to force legislators to enter another contentious debate and take another risky vote. They probably just want to lay low, let the economy rebound a bit, and let their numbers inch up; their main goal is to avoid catastrophe. They remember all too well August of last year, when the teabaggers savaged House Dems who voted for the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill and no one rose to defend them.

But right now those Dems are headed into tough elections with the worst of both worlds: a controversial vote but no bill, no historic accomplishment. Wouldn’t they be better off if they could campaign on the bill’s benefits rather than the merits of their (pointless) votes?

In D.C., pundits and consultants always advise caution and defensiveness. Always. It’s always the safe advice to offer and the safe advice to take. But like Friedman says, there’s reason to believe that the American people respond to serious conviction and ambition. What message will they get if Dems warn about climate change and oil dependence in shrill terms for two years and then … do nothing about it? Is that really a more savvy political strategy?

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by Steve Cowell

Now that it has passed the House of Representatives with flying colors (246 to 161), we are thisclose to making Home Star a reality. This is the plan, supported on both sides of the aisle, that would give U.S. homeowners rebates for energy-efficiency improvements that cut energy consumption. Most importantly, Home Star will put many of the country’s construction folks and blue-collar wage earners back to work, so let’s get it passed in the Senate and on President Obama’s desk already!

The bill has unique bipartisan support and is backed by one of the largest coalitions to hit Washington in years. In just a few months, the Home Star Coalition has signed more than 1,300 members. Supporters come from labor unions, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, contractors, retailers, utilities, and regulators, to name a few groups. We’re gaining more ground every day and the time is right for Congress to make it into law.  But first a little history:

Home Star was introduced to The White House in November 2009. The concept was so well-received, Home Star was unanimously voted for by the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board the following month. Since then, this plan to weatherize America’s homes has undergone much review and analysis by a coalition of more than 1,000 stakeholders, the Senate, the House, and the administration. Its pros and cons have been analyzed, dissected, and debated on blogs, TV, and in mainstream newspapers for months now. It is time to move past the talk and get to the action. 

Home Star will put hundreds of thousands of people back to work and provide economic recovery to a large number of blue-collar workers hit hardest by this recession.

The disparity between blue- and white-collar workers who have been affected by the economy is striking—one in five workers in blue collar industries across America is jobless. On the other hand, those making $150,000 a year or more are barely impacted. (Three percent are unemployed as of this writing.) These are the findings of a study [PDF] authored by Professor Andrew Sum, Northeastern University’s director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. In a radio interview earlier this year, he said, “It’s The Great Depression for blue-collar workers—with dire implications for society … this rate of joblessness is greater than any post-wartime period in history.”

Home Star will benefit unemployed blue-collar laborers and experienced workers who have lost jobs in construction and manufacturing because their skills can be easily adapted. Beyond retrofitting, Home Star will have a ripple effect, creating jobs in other areas such as retailing, trucking, and manufacturing. In fact, U.S. factories will crank out 92 percent of the products needed to support the program, from insulation to replacement windows.

Home Star will also help cash-strapped homeowners defray the costs of investments that will lower their energy bills. It would provide rebates of $1,000 to $1,500 for insulation, duct, and air sealing, installation of more energy-efficient equipment, and other items at a “Silver Star” level. For more comprehensive home energy improvements (“Gold Star level”), consumers would receive a federal rebate of up to $3,000 for retrofits that result in savings of 20 percent. And the higher the energy savings achieved, the higher the rebate, up to $8,000.  

Homeowners who use less energy can create an economic environment that can help ease problems in the housing market. Not coincidentally, the mortgage default crisis occurred at exactly the same time that energy prices spiked in 2007 and 2008. High energy bills may only be one factor in pushing a homeowner over the edge. But the correlation between high energy bills and a family’s ability to afford a mortgage payment is a direct one.

The icing on the cake is that Home Star will help preserve the environment. Residential buildings generate more than 20 percent of our nation’s carbon dioxide emissions—twice what automobiles emit. Existing techniques and technologies in energy-efficiency retrofitting can reduce home energy use by 30 percent per home and lower associated greenhouse-gas emissions significantly. Total associated savings in home energy bills is estimated to be as much as $9.4 billion over 10 years. Not a bad return on a $6 billion investment in Home Star!

If Home Star passes, programs will be set up here in America, right now. Its unemployed citizens can finally get back to work. Retrofit workers will earn decent wages, spurring new opportunities for themselves and their families. The societal benefits of Home Star are infinite.

By enacting Home Star, we can help end The Great Blue Collar Depression and keep our economy on the road to recovery.
 

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by Agence France-Presse

U.S. climate envoy Todd SternWASHINGTON – The lead U.S. climate negotiator said Tuesday it was politically unrealistic for the next treaty to impose global targets for emission cuts, amid deep divisions between rich and developing nations.

Special envoy Todd Stern said a better model was the “bottom-up architecture” proposed by Australia during last year’s Copenhagen summit, in which each nation submits details of its own actions to the United Nations.

“No across-the-board, top-down target would be acceptable at this stage to most developing countries and, indeed, it would not work well for us either,” Stern said at The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

“The notion that you’re going to negotiate some across-the-board target with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa and many other countries … is not that likely.”

Over 190 nations are negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change, which U.N. scientists warn could bring growing disasters and threaten entire species if left unchecked.

The Kyoto Protocol had set a target of industrialized nations cutting emissions blamed for global warming by an average of 5 percent by the end of 2012 from 1990 levels, with a corresponding figure calculated for each country. The United States was the only major nation to reject the treaty, arguing it was unfair because it made no demands of fast-growing emerging economies such as China—now the top carbon emitter. 

President Barack Obama reversed course when taking office by seeking action on climate change.

But Stern, who helped negotiate Kyoto under former president Bill Clinton, said he was mindful of the political lessons from that experience. 

“We sort of came into this with a sense that the way we did Kyoto didn’t work so well,” Stern said.  “We negotiated the target in Kyoto not only before there was any law, but before there was any foundation of domestic support” for legislation, he added.

The U.S. Senate just last week took up a bill that would set up the first nationwide plan to curb carbon emissions, although individual states have taken similar initiatives.

“It is enormously important for our international leverage and credibility that we pass strong legislation,” Stern said. “If the United States means to assert leadership, it needs to act like a leader.”

Yet he cautioned that the roadblocks to reaching a final agreement “wouldn’t disappear” even if the United States approved climate-change legislation.

China and other major developing nations have argued that wealthy countries bear historic responsibility for climate change and have balked at any legally binding targets, particularly without firmer U.S. action.

India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said on a visit to Beijing earlier this month that prospects for a breakthrough in time for the next major climate meeting in December were “very, very remote.” Ramesh said talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun may produce a political statement expanding on the Copenhagen accord but would not yield an agreement.

The Copenhagen Accord calls for nations to work together to stave off warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels.
But voluntary pledges registered under the deal put the Earth on track for increases of 3.5 to 4.0 degrees Celsius (6.3 to 7.2 Fahrenheit).

Related Links:

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by Ed Bruske

Part 5 of Cafeteria Confidential: Berkeley,
in which Ed Bruske reports on his recent week-long, firsthand look at
how Berkeley, Calif., schools part ways from the typical school diet of
frozen, industrially processed convenience foods. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook.

After spending hours sorting chicken pieces during my first day on the job in the Berkeley school system’s central kitchen, I got a break.

“How would you like to serve the kids at lunch?” asked Joan Gallagher, the sous chef in charge of kitchen production. “It’s the most exciting part of the day. You’ll get to interact with the kids.”

I would soon learn that interactions with middle-schoolers over lunch food can test your nerves.

The not-so-magical fruit

My assignment was to scoop beans at one of two pizza stations in the “Dining Commons” at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. About 1,000 kids attend the school. They descend on the Commons in three waves, beginning at 11:25 am. First they check in at one of two cashiers, where they punch a personalized, four-digit number on a small keypad that identifies them as either a free, reduced-price, or pay-in-full customer. They get a ticket they’re supposed to deposit in a plastic bucket when they pick up their food. And they grab a tray, a reusable plastic dinner plate, and silverware.

The author, in hair net, scooping pastaThere are four food stations in all. In middle school, kids get a choice of two entrees; elementary school kids get only one. The other choice on Mondays is a taco with beans and rice.

The pizza produced in the central kitchen is quite good. In addition to canned tomatoes, the marinara sauce for the red pizza is loaded with vegetables: 125 pounds of celery, carrot, onion and garlic to be precise, all cooked in a giant kettle. The sausage pizza is topped with homemade turkey sausage. And a third variety—my favorite—is slathered with pesto.

In the district’s elementary schools, the pizza is made on rectangular baking sheets using a whole-wheat crust from a local bakery, FullBloom. Middle schoolers get something quite different: a round pizza that’s also made with a whole-wheat crust, but from an institutional supplier, Sysco. The reason? “By the time they get to middle school, kids are already very brand- or package-conscious,” says Executive Chef Bonnie Christensen. “They want round pizza.”

They had their ideas about beans, too, even the gorgeous, plump cannellini beans in a Tuscan-style salad that I was serving with an ice-cream scoop to go with the pizza. Basically, they didn’t want the beans.

“No beans!” I heard as plate after plate was thrust in our direction, demanding a slice of pizza. “No beans!” “No beans!”

Government regulations require that a certain quantity of vegetables or fruits be offered with school meals, along with meat, or meat alternative, and grains. The emphasis is on the word “offered,” because the kids can take what they want, as long as they take three of the items provided. If they don’t, what they do take doesn’t qualify as a “meal” and won’t be credited for purposes of the federal subsidies the school receives to pay for the food.

So how hard should I push the beans, which count as a vegetable? There was also a big bowl of oranges and apples at our station. The kids could take one of those. Or they could serve themselves a salad at the salad bar a few yards away. In most schools, the kids fill their plates in the food line before they get to the cashier. The unusual arrangement in Berkeley’s “dining commons” is deliberately more open and less institutional, suggesting an actual dining experience rather than a cattle call. But it does inject a bit of uncertainty. How were we supposed to kow what the kids did after they left our station if all they had on their plate was a slice of pizza and no beans?

Next to me was one of the regular servers, Joyce, who was handing out the pizza. She urged me not to push the beans too hard. “We want to be friends with the older kids,” she whispered. When I described to Christensen the uncertainty I was experiencing—the sense I got from Joyce that maybe I shouldn’t antagonize the kids by making them take beans they didn’t want—the executive chef didn’t flinch. “I antagonize them,” she said jokingly.

By the end of the week, I had a pat answer for kids who said they didn’t want the beans: “The federal government says you must have beans,” I’d say after grabbing their plate and dropping a scoop of Tuscan bean salad on it. Quickly followed by: “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.”

The kids looked at me like I’d landed from Mars. I could see how this would get old fast.

Berkeley schools’ homemade lo mein hides lots of vegetables … just not well enough.(Ed Bruske)In fact, a quick tour around the dining hall told me the kids weren’t eating many beans. Mostly they scraped the beans into a compost receptacle at the end of the meal. On Wednesday—pasta day in Berkeley schools—I would confront this issue again when I was asked to man a station serving two kinds of lo mein. One was made with diced chicken and a mix of diced carrots, peas, and corn. A second vegetarian option had tofu with roasted broccoli and cauliflower.

The “lo mein” was really spaghetti noodles tossed with the other ingredients and a light Asian sauce. The vegetables in the chicken version in particular just wanted to sink to the bottom of the pan and disappear under the noodles. Kids who opted for the chicken lo mein frequently added “no vegetables” to their request. I would give them vegetables anyway. That seemed to irritate them. I would get an icy stare. One girl in particular got angry. I guess I misheard her, because I thought she said she wanted the vegetables. I did my best to find some with my spring-loaded tongs and lift them onto her plate. Finally she stomped her foot and sneered, “I said, no vegetables!”

Yikes.

I was getting the impression that kids in Berkeley weren’t really much different from kids everywhere. In most cafeterias I’ve visited—I sit in on meals at my daughter’s school almost every day—kids generally reject vegetables.

In District of Columbia schools, as in most places, these are canned green beans, or steamed carrots, or broccoli steamed until it disintegrates. The serving trays dressed with these limp vegetable side dishes look like a clumsy attempt to comply with federal regulations, no more. The kids typically don’t touch the vegetables and just throw them in the trash. In fact, the drafters of “Healthy Schools” legislation in D.C. had planned to adopt newly proposed school meal standards from the Institute of Medicine that call for increased portions of vegetables. But local school officials begged them not to, saying there was no way the schools could prepare additional vegetables kids would actually eat. It would just be money down the drain.

Until five years ago, meals in Berkeley schools were served much the same way. Vegetables were canned or frozen. Fruit came in a can, in a bath of sugary syrup. But you won’t see vegetables served as “sides” in Berkeley these days. There are no steamed carrots.

“Kids don’t like carrots,” Gallagher says. And no steamed broccoli. “Steaming removes the nutrients from vegetables,” says Christensen. Instead, broccoli and other vegetables are more often roasted. Not only does  roasting not leach out nutrients, it enhances the color and flavor of vegetables. “Roasting vegetables definitely is the way to go,” she says.

That may just sum up the difference between a kitchen run by professional chefs and the majority of school kitchens that cook out of freezers.

Berkeley schools are now equipped with salad bars from which kids can help themselves. The week I was there, the salad bar in the Dining Commons offered romaine lettuce, white beans, cottage cheese, chopped hard-boiled eggs, raw jicama slices, sliced radishes, pickled jalapeño slices, roasted potato wedges, sliced carrots, chickpeas, raw cauliflower and broccoli, hummus, corn, and and types of dressing.

According to “Lunch Matters,” a 2008 report published by the Chez Panisse Foundation, lunch participation among students who qualify for either free or reduced-price meals increased to more than 50 percent at one Berkeley middle school after a salad bar was installed. The school district employs special part-time workers to maintain the salad bars. During my week in the central kitchen, I did not see kids exactly attacking the salad bar. I asked Christensen if it was safe to say that kids just don’t like to eat vegetables. Why go to all the trouble to source and prepare fresh vegetables if children are just going to turn up their nose at them?

Christensen stood firm. “Are they eating white beans? No,” she says. “But they know what blood oranges are. It’s an incremental process, and I’ll take incremental progress.”

While it’s also true that middle school students do not tend to go to the salad bar, according to Christensen, they do in the elementary schools, where they get “a lot more encouragement and guidance.”

As far as eating other vegetables, “you can’t force feed them. All we can do is expose them and only give them good choices.” Kids might not eat the vegetables now, she says, “but if they feel what it’s like to be nourished, then later, when they’re on their own and spending their own money, they’ll make different choices. We’re trying to teach them what it’s like to eat healthy food. We’re not going to see results overnight.”

In fact, Berkeley schools can’t afford to spend money and labor on food that won’t be eaten. “The quality of the ingredients is so much better than it used to be, and they’re perishable, so they cost more,” Christensen explains. (Fresh vegetables are “regionally sourced” and organic “to the maximum extent possible”; see accompanying article on how Berkeley sources its food.)

Rather than being served as separate side dishes the students might reject, vegetabales are incorporated into school meals in other ways, such as the lo mein or the 125 pounds of onions, carrots, celery, and garlic that go into the marinara sauce. “I make things like tabouleh, white beans with braised collard greens, vegetable stir fry, vegetables in the chicken cacciatore, in the garlic-bacon pasta,” Christensen says. “There’s a ton of vegetables in the meat loaf and the shepherd’s pie, and we make stir-fried rice with lots of vegetables.” There are also vegetables in the soup, offered daily.

A culinary education

The chefs visit classes on Thursdays for something called “What’s on Your Plate,” where they talk to students about the food that’s being served. Gallagher, the sous chef, says the students might not accept some foods at all without these sessions. Tandoori chicken, made from a recipe handed down by Christensen’s mother, is one example. It’s roasted after being coated with a yogurt marinade. The finished chicken has a rustic—some might say “gnarly”—appearance that can, and has, put kids off.

In “What’s on Your Plate,” the students get to taste the food and offer comments. “They write their comments on individual pieces of paper and the teachers send them back to us,” says Christensen. “I love these! You’d be impressed with what the children have to say when prompted for a thoughtful response.”

On some issues, however, the kids won’t budge. They drew the line with nachos.

In the old days, nachos—“chips in a boat with that big cheese stuff poured over the top and jalapeños”—were served every couple of days, Cooper recalls. “I looked at it and took it off the menu. The kids went on strike. They said they weren’t going to eat there and they stopped coming in for lunch.” Since then, nachos are served every Friday. They’re just different nachos: no more gobs of melted cheese—meat, beans, rice and grated cheese instead. “Nobody wants to fight that battle,” Gallagher shrugs. “It’s Friday.”

Berkeley middle schoolers prep vegetables for stir fry in an Edible Schoolyard classroom.(Ed Bruske)Across the playground and up the hill from the dining commons is the Edible Schoolyard, founded by Alice Waters, where students rotate in and out of 1.5-hour classes over the course of the year, working in the garden and taking cooking lessons in the garden’s kitchen. The idea is to familiarize children with where food comes from, and to teach the importance of a healthful diet and a respectful approach toward eating.

I sat in on one of the cooking classes, in which middle-schoolers made their own tofu-and-vegetable stir fry. The kitchen is remarkably well-equipped, with three long tables set at an ideal height for chopping, three stations with sinks and electric burners, individual cuttting boards and knives for all the students, vegetable peelers, zesters, a freestanding convection oven turning out an impeccable strawberry gallette, and at the other end of the room, a commercial-grade dishwashing area.

Just like in my own cooking classes at a private elementary school here in D.C., these kids had a ball. They ernestly chopped vegetables and couldn’t wait for a turn cooking in woks. When the cooking was done, they cleared the tables and spread checkered tablecloths on which they set plates, silverware, and glasses. Alice Waters would have been proud.

The Dr. Robert C. & Veronica Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley has been monitoring elementary-school children in Berkeley to see if the gardening and food lessons have increased their appetite for fruits and vegetables, both at home and at school. University students venture into the field to photograph kids’ plates in cafeterias, administer questionnaires, and cull information from food diaries. The results so far: kids who get the extra exposure to gardens and food preparation tend to be more receptive to eating produce … but not by much.

According to that research, kids are more likely to say they like vegetables “a little” than “a lot.” Those who garden give higher marks to these: asparagus, squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Updated results from this ongoing study are expected to be released later this month.

After spending a week in Waters’ back yard, I wondered what she thought about the food her movement has inspired in the Berkeley schools. Had she ever visited the Dining Commons?

I sent my questions to an aide at the Chez Panisse Foundation. Waters, the aide replied in an e-mail, “is interested in a complete re-imagination of a school lunch program, one that—among other things—could help educate the students with dishes that teach them about different cultures and ingredients. Of course she is certainly thrilled that real and fresh ingredients have replaced processed foods—this is a major piece of the puzzle—but she is hoping to take that even further by evolving menus.” And yes, Waters has eaten in the dining commons “on a number of occasions,” the aide said.

I wonder if she tried the beans.

Related Links:

Healthy breakfasts buy lunch in Berkeley schools

Two Berkeley chefs make healthy food that kids will eat

New report from Childhood Obesity Task Force has something for everyone

by Ashley Braun

pie4dan via Flickr Creative Commons

When the truth hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a-mor-e.

When the pizza was cooked on an old coffin’s roof, that’s … a-pall-ing.

Even if you’ve gone to heaven, you still might be burning after you’re gone … that is, if you were buried in Naples, Italy. As it turns out, the birthplace of pizza may be stoking its wood-fired ovens with wood from, er, used caskets. “A gang might have set up a market for coffins sold to hard-hearted owners of bakeries and pizzerias looking to save money on wood,” Italian daily newspaper Il Giornale reported.

Hey, at least they’re reusing!

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by Kristin Eberhard

Some commentators have mistakenly concluded that if Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman’s American Power Act passes, it will make California’s Global Warming Solution Act (AB 32) moot. This is wrong. The American Power Act preserves nearly all of California’s clean energy and carbon reduction policy tools. It would take away only one tool: the authority for a state—or regional—level cap-and-trade program. Although cap-and-trade is one important tool, the fact is that 80 percent of the carbon pollution reductions required by AB 32 are expected to result from other clean energy and carbon control polices implemented under that law. Whether or not the American Power Act is enacted this year, California can and should move full speed ahead with those measures.

The American Power Act allows and encourages California­ to move ahead with clean energy and global warming pollution reduction strategies.

California has long been a leader on environmental policies, including promoting cleaner energy and cleaner cars. In more recent years, California’s clean energy and global warming pollution reduction policies have made the state a mecca for investments in clean technologies that will power our future. The American Power Act recognizes California’s leadership, and it respects and protects our state’s ability to:

Set its own carbon standards for vehicles, as well as other states’ option to adopt California’s standards (sec. 4141).
Establish carbon pollution limits, clean energy, and energy efficiency programs for other sources that are more stringent than federal requirements; and,
Establish overall statewide limits on global warming pollution, such as the targets in California’s AB 32.

The American Power Act preserves all of California’s carbon-curbing clean energy tools except cap-and-trade.

While the Kerry-Lieberman bill would protect most state powers to advance clean energy and curb global warming pollution, it singles out for permanent preemption one particular state authority. States would be prohibited from running cap-and-trade programs once the federal program to curb carbon pollution gets off the ground (sec. 2501, adding Clean Air Act sec. 806).

The effect of this provision on California, however, will be limited. As already noted, 80 percent of the carbon reductions expected under California’s Global Warming Solutions Act are coming from other clean energy and carbon reduction policies. Moreover, the American Power Act would provide California and other states that already have cap-and-trade programs with revenue from the federal allowance auction in place of revenue they would have raised by auctioning allowances at the state level.

Creating a national pollution limit is important so long as the national program is working well and achieving our national pollution reduction and clean technology goals. NRDC believes, however, that California and other states should retain the authority to limit carbon pollution by any cost-effective means, including cap-and-trade, if at any time the federal program and fails to achieve its goals.

The American Power Act builds on California’s leadership.

Using allowance value for the public good

While California has yet to finalize its rules statewide cap-and-trade rules, the consensus borne of three years of public dialogue among key stakeholders is that revenue from a cap-and-trade program can and should be used to help us transition towards a clean energy economy. This help can take the form of investing in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and research, development and deployment of new clean technologies, or providing refunds or rebates directly to consumers. Following California’s lead, the American Power Act recognizes this opportunity and provides for auction revenue—which will grow over time—to be invested in energy efficiency and in consumers.

Emission Performance Standard for coal plants

In 2006, California enacted legislation preventing new long-term investments in power plants that don’t meet a global warming pollution performance standard. This law sent a market signal to power developers in the West that dirty energy sources are not good long-term investments. The American Power Act picks up on this idea and establishes global warming pollution emission performance standards for new coal-fired electric power plants. It is not as aggressive as California’s but sends a signal to the national market that we need to move away from dirty energy and invest in clean energy sources.

The American Power Act unnecessarily threatens California’s coastline and marine life at risk.

For all the good it will do to curb global warming, the Kerry-Lieberman bill unwisely encourages new offshore drilling in previously protected areas. It does this by enticing east coast states with 37.5 percent of federal offshore oil and gas revenues, with absolutely no strings attached to the use of this money.

The American Power Act does give states the option to veto offshore leasing within 75 miles of their coasts (sec. 1204). However, states would face an uphill battle to achieve the veto: each state must pass a bill, and then the governor must petition the federal government, then the Interior Department must review and accept the petition, then the five-year leasing program must be revised. Meanwhile, leasing, seismic exploration, drilling, production and pipeline activities could go forward while states are jumping through hoops to get the veto. My colleague Regan Nelson has written in more detail on the offshore oil provisions.

Luckily, California is on the ball. Congressman John Garamendi sponsored the California West Coast Ocean Protection Act of 2010, a bill with 28 co-sponsors, which will stop all new offshore oil leases in federal waters on the West Coast. The bill has identical companion legislation in the Senate, sponsored by all six West Coast Senators, including California Senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. Governor Schwarzenegger recently announced his opposition to new drilling off California’s coast despite the lure of as much as $100 million for the state’s coffers. However, we cannot be sure that the legislature will be able to act quickly enough nor that future governors will put the welfare of the state’s coastline and marine resources ahead of crass financial considerations. We are disappointed to see the bill encourage governors to trade off their states’ economic and environmental well-being with an activity that is so dangerous and deadly for our coasts, marine life, and fishing industry.

California continues to set the pace.

The bill as introduced by Sens. Kerry and Lieberman has several important implications for our ongoing work to build a clean energy economy here in California. We don’t have time to waste and we are working hard for Congress to act this year on comprehensive climate legislation, but California can and should move forward, regardless, with clean energy and global warming pollution reduction strategies and implementation of AB 32.

California has been and should continue to be a leader in putting clean cars on the roads, in giving Californians the option to pursue the cleanest forms of transportation and powering our homes and businesses with clean energy.

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