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It’s Been a Big Year for Transportation, More Needs to Be Done | Readers Write

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By Mona Rios

It’s been a big year for transportation in the San Diego region. Major transit lines have opened up, the public has been exploring new transportation technologies, and our transportation governing agencies have been overhauled for the better.

The year started with a bang as Assembly Bill 805 went into effect in January. This bill, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, brought needed changes to the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). It’s made our agencies more democratic, more representative of voters, and it provided more oversight of our tax dollars.

At MTS, it required the chairperson to be a democratically-elected official. The Board of MTS selected city of San Diego Councilmember Georgette Gomez as Chairperson and myself as Vice Chair. It’s been an honor to serve National City and the region as Vice Chair of MTS.

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Thom Yorke (Radiohead) – Hands off the Antarctic | Video Worth Watching

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There’s been much talk this election cycle of voting for things that are not explicitly on the ballot. Trump has said that even if his name isn’t on the ballot, a vote for a Republican is a vote for him. Here’s something else not on the ballot: the Antarctic. And even if it isn’t on the ballot, a vote for anyone that doesn’t take climate change seriously is a vote to destroy the Antarctic. Meanwhile, Thom Yorke graces us with his sonic interpretation of this mesmerizing Antarctic imagery from the Greenpeace ship “Arctic Sunrise”.   [Read more…]

Young San Diegans Speak Out About Climate Change

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San Diego Youth Speak Out About Climate Change

By Stephanie Corkran of SanDiego350, and these six young people of San Diego who were interviewed.

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from the children” is a quote attributed to the iconic environmentalist David Brower. Isn’t it time that we listen to what the children have to say? After all, they will be the ones who will inherit an overheated planet with extreme weather events, including intense storms, floods, droughts, and sea level rise.

The big question is: Will the children will have their say in court? Juliana v. U.S. is a constitutional climate lawsuit filed by 21 youths, ages 11 to 22. Since climate change is the overarching issue of our times (and perhaps of all time for our species), Juliana v. U.S. may well become the “trial of the century”.   [Read more…]

No More Kicking Climate Change Down the Road

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Mankind has only 12 years left to make unprecedented cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if we want to stave off unimaginably catastrophic effects of runaway global warming. This is the warning detailed in October’s report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the recognized global climate authority which represents the investigations of hundreds of climate scientists and 195 participating nations.   [Read more…]

Valve Turners on Trial: Judge Acquits Three Climate Activists Who Shut Down Tar Sands Pipelines | Video Worth Watching

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From the Democracy Now! YouTube page:

A month before the 2016 election, anti-pipeline activists staged an unprecedented coordinated action to shut down the flow of oil from the United States to Canada. On October 11, 2016, activists in North Dakota, Washington, Montana and Minnesota turned the manual safety valves on four pipelines, temporarily halting the flow of nearly 70 percent of the crude oil imported to the United States from Canada. They came to be known as the “Valve Turners.” What followed was a lengthy legal battle that ended with some of the activists in jail. But on Tuesday, three valve turners who broke into an oil pipeline facility in Minnesota on that day in 2016 were acquitted. We speak with the valve turners themselves, Annette Klapstein and Emily Johnston, about their acquittal. Johnston is a poet and co-founder of 350Seattle.org and Klapstein is a retired attorney for the Puyallup tribe and member of the Raging Grannies. We also speak with their attorney Kelsey Skaggs and Dr. James Hansen, the former top climate scientist at NASA.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out: Supes Ready to Vote Based on a Failed Staff McClellan-Palomar Airport Analysis

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The San Diego County Board of Supervisors  (BOS) cannot decide wisely when it relies on poor staff information.

Need an example?  Look at the BOS October 10, 2018, McClellan-Palomar Airport, Agenda Item.   Palomar is in the city of Carlsbad.

County staff recommends that the Board approve a 20-Year Palomar Master Plan (PMP) to spend up to $112,000,000 to extend the 4900-foot runway up to 900 feet and to relocate the runway about 100 feet to the north before 2036.     [Read more…]

UN Climate Report Warns of Grim Consequences, Shrinking Time Frame for Action

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By Meteor Blades / Daily Kos

A decade, maybe a little more, is all the time we have left for acting to keep global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial era, U.N. scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced Monday. That’s 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the dawn of the industrial age, global warming has boosted temperatures 1.0-1.2 degrees Celsius.

The good news from the scientists is that the 1.5-degree goal may still be attainable. That’s unlike what most scientists thought when the 2015 Paris climate agreement included 1.5 degrees as an “aspirational” goal. Their view was that it was only realistic to shoot for 2 degrees (3.6 degrees F).

The bad news is we’re nowhere near either of those goals and the consequences of not acting soon are grim. As we have heard from scientists more than once previously, those consequences are happening more immediately than previously thought, according to the draft IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.    [Read more…]

Re-Branded NAFTA: Yes to Big Oil, No to Consumer, Health, Safety and Environmental Protections

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Environmentalists on Monday slammed President Donald Trump’s replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter warning that it “would enshrine and globalize Trump’s deregulatory zealotry into a trade pact that would outlast the administration and imperil future efforts to protect consumers, workers, and the environment.”

Presented as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), many have noted that Trump’s trade deal, as Bloomberg put it, “looks more like a rebranding than a revolution,” despite Trump’s vows when he was a presidential candidate that he would negotiate a new deal that’s dramatically better for American workers. As experts and campaigners comb through the details of the agreement, environmental activists are homing in on provisions they warn would endanger people and the planet.   [Read more…]

A Tale of Two Properties – Carlsbad at a Crossroads

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By Socrates Kanetakis

Carlsbad finds itself amidst a commercial rebirth; from the Barrio to Bressi, the sight of new mini-towns, condominiums, clothing stores and eateries is hard to miss. Aside from what these developments mean for traffic, sales taxes and for the daily “wow they are building everywhere” exclamations, they mostly affect two commodities: Land and energy.

Along the narrow stretch of the I5—between Canon and Tamarack—lie two examples of those commodities; the Encina power plant on one side and the vacant south shore of Agua Hedionda on the other. Although these parcels differ in terms of utility, they both face a similar future. One is being decommissioned and the other faces imminent “commission” of some—yet—undecided sort.

Seeing how the city will need both land and energy to accommodate its rising population and blooming commercial establishments, these two properties can and will need to be effectively utilized very soon; It’s all a matter of “how”?      [Read more…]

California’s Recycling Crisis: China Doesn’t Want Our Trash Anymore

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It’s a sad fact of our Californian recycling world – China no longer wants our trash.

China used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables, but in January, China began not accepting “contaminated” material it once brought to its shores. For China, now, if the recycled material is one-half of 1% contaminated, it’s too impure for recycling.

CalRecyle – which runs California’s recycling program – stated in a bulletin in August:

“This policy change is already starting to have adverse impacts on California, and is resulting in more material being stockpiled at solid waste facilities and recycling centers or disposed of in landfills.”   [Read more…]

Climate Change, Clogged Drains, and Lorie Zapf

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By Jordan Beane

On September 13th, the Union-Tribune released their interviews with our District 2 candidates, Dr. Jennifer Campbell and current District 2 City Councilmember Lorie Zapf. In Zapf’s interview, there were a lot of specific questions about the Climate Action Plan, it’s goals and more.

However, I believe the UT should have asked her a simpler question: Do you, Councilmember Zapf, believe in climate change?

Our Republican representative wants you to believe she cares about this existential threat and its impact on San Diego. She, along with the rest of the city council, voted to approve San Diego’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) in 2015. She mentioned the CAP in an op-ed. She even used the word “climate”  in a tweet once (the only time she’s done so in 1,700+ missives). She and the Lincoln Club (San Diego’s version of the Koch Brothers) flooded the mailboxes of District 2 with the same two images of Zapf cleaning out the San Diego River, portraying our Republican representative as an environmental champion.   [Read more…]

Storm Surge Meets Virtual Reality Technology – The Weather Channel Animation | Video Worth Watching

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The Weather Channel shared on its Twitter feed this impressive animation designed to illustrate the impact of various levels of storm surge. For the curious, Wired has the backstory on How The Weather Channel Made That Insane Storm Surge Animation, describing the technology that made the production of the video possible.   [Read more…]

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