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Carlsbad Report on Caruso’s Lagoon Mall: Close Enough for Government Work?

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By Richard Riehl/ The Riehl World

On February 23 the people of Carlsbad will vote on Measure A, an L.A. developer’s attempt to bypass normal city and state reviews, allowing him to build a thirteen-acre shopping center overlooking the Agua Hedionda lagoon.

The City council’s staff report claims to be an “impartial planning, policy, economic, and environmental analysis” of Rick Caruso’s lagoon mall plan. But I was reminded of a summer job I once had with the Washington State Highway Department, working to keep contractors honest by testing their highway asphalt samples.

I learned how politics trumped highway safety when my supervisor kept telling me to re-test failed samples until they passed. I guessed he didn’t want to bring bad news to his boss’s desk. So I stopped bringing it to his, following the advice of my fellow workers, the lab’s old timers, “Close enough for government work.”   [Read more…]

Inclusion and Equity Essential in San Diego’s Climate Action Plan

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By Diane Takvorian / Environmental Health Coalition (EHC)

Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) is supportive of the proposed City of San Diego Climate Action Plan with amendments to include equity for impacted communities and commitments for implementation funding.

EHC is very supportive of the strong targets and actions in the City of San Diego’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) and appreciate the great amount of work staff and the Environmental and Economic Sustainability Task Force has done to bring the CAP to this point. Although we appreciate the mention of equity in the CAP, in order to ensure that the CAP goals are met within the timeline prescribed in the plan in an equitable manner funding for implementation and integration of specific equity focused directives must be included in the CAP in each section of the plan.   [Read more…]

Naomi Klein: Liberté is not just a Word

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Backs defiance of French protest ban during climate change negotiations.

By Naomi Klein/ Democracy Now

The deal that will be unveiled in less than a week, likely to much fanfare and self-congratulation from politicians, echoed by an overly deferential press, will not be enough to keep us safe. In fact, it will be extraordinarily dangerous. We know, from doing the math and adding up the targets that the major economies have brought to Paris, that those targets lead us to a very dangerous future.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: The Oldest Refugee Crisis

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My thoughts race with yesterday. My friend Max Wilbert and I left Park City, Utah in the pre-dawn bitter cold crossing the Wasatch Mountains that form the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The drive west from Salt Lake City on I-80 is disorienting. We began the journey with the radio on. We both became too frustrated by news of another politician refusing to accept refugees, so we turned the radio off to watch the land as we traveled.

Interstate 80 took us past the sites of some of the West’s most destructive extraction industries including Kennecott Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine. The Oquirrh Mountains stand tall on the Salt Lake Valley’s west side, each peak a majestic testament to the forces of beauty who formed the Great Basin.

Each peak, save one.   [Read more…]

This Supersedes Everything

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I drove over the crest of the hill to my home,
just as the sun was departing in a glorious inferno of red orange yellow.
Oh Nature, you can be such a show off!
I had to pull over and pause to pay tribute,
pause to marvel,
as human eyes have marveled for millennium.
I have never seen a creature not human
watch the sunset in awe,
and I muse that perhaps this is our raison d’être,
to simply pay homage to the magnificence of creation.   [Read more…]

SDG&E: Solar’s Fake Friend

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By Hutton Marshall/ SanDiego350.org

San Diego Gas & Electric, our friendly neighborhood energy provider whether we like it or not, continues to prove that their claims to support clean energy are merely superficial. Especially in regards to solar energy, the most efficient, environmentally friendly energy source available to homes and businesses, SDG&E continues to favor policies that diminish the critical financial incentives that allow San Diegans to generate their own clean energy.   [Read more…]

March and Rally for Climate Justice, This Saturday!

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Balboa Park March and Rally Saturday December 12

Last week as the big climate talks kicked off in Paris it was my pleasure to co-host with Masada Disenhouse of SanDiego350 a community screening of Naomi Klein’s new film This Changes Everything. We used this screening to help facilitate a discussion among folks from the local labor and environmental movements along with representatives from various community and student groups that was focused on the intersection between the climate crisis and the fight against economic inequality. Many folks expressed spirited opinions on how we might join the interests of the poor and workers with those fighting to save the planet.  

The film poses an important question: how can we come to see the corner that the climate crisis puts us in not as a reason for despair but as an opportunity to challenge the stale hegemony of market fundamentalism and create a better more humane world?    

While there is not a single easy answer, it’s never been more clear that the intersection of our historic level of economic inequality and the bankruptcy of the old story we have told ourselves about our unexamined dominion over the earth and its resources is leading us down what Klein calls “the suicide path.”  
  [Read more…]

Progressive San Diego: 15 Years Ago Was a High Water Mark for OB Activism

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In 2000 OBGO Held Its First ‘Coming-Out’ Community Forum

Grassroots activism has been in the air in OB of late, with a definite spike last year during the campaign to have the OB Community Plan approved, but it also has been seen this year around the Plan at the Coastal Commission. Prior to 2014, however, there had been many a lean year in terms of genuine local activism across the village, many a moon had passed without throwing shadows on such OBcean activity as petitions and community mobilizations.

And that’s the way grassroots activism is, it comes and goes – like the tides that lap OB’s beaches and cliffs.

Coincidentally or not, there has been some talk – also of late – of a former OB activist group.   [Read more…]

Terrorism Bumps Climate Change Off the Front Page

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The United Nations climate conference in Paris has been pushed off the top of the news in the US cycle by stories relating to what now appears to have been an act of terrorism in San Bernadino. Various news agencies are reporting that suspect Tashfeen Malik pledged her allegiance to an Islamic State leader on Facebook.

The current consensus is that the couple were inspired by, rather than ordered to action by the terrorist group. The media narrative is befuddled, I think, because the possibility of a woman being the instigator of the act hadn’t been considered.

Despite the media’s propensity for hyperbole (the so-call flak jackets worn during the attack were actually vests with multiple pockets), enough detail has emerged to conclude the San Bernadino shooting was not a singular act. Most damning are the law enforcement sources quoted about hard drives and cell phones being destroyed in the days leading up to the attack.   [Read more…]

North Of The Fence: Meth Seizures Up, Violent Attacks and Holiday Cheer

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With the horror of the San Bernadino events and PBS reporting that 355 mass shootings took place across the United States in 2015, the South Bay this week also faced its share of disturbing violence and mayhem:

KPBS reported that meth seizures are up at the border since 2009. The drug is now being produced in Mexican “super labs,” staffed by university-educated chemists and supplied by manufacturers based in Asia. This trend is occurring during a time when less and less marijuana is being grown in Mexico due to its legalization in the U.S. The Imperial Beach Patch showed the terrible destruction meth can cause on a young adult.   [Read more…]

Nailing Monsanto

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At the tail end of CBS This Morning this Wednesday, was a brief interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Hugh Grant (not the movie star), on the debate over GMO labeling. He tried to come off as a soft-spoken, reasonable man, describing his company as “…an agricultural company. We sell seeds to farmers and those farmers make harvests and those harvest end up on plates around the world.”

Cool. The man running the company that is poisoning our planet and our population is just so damn nice, what with putting all that poison (err food) on our plates!

What if we don’t want his poison? Nice Mr. Grant wants to cram it down your throat. His nice agricultural company spent over $4 million killing a GMO labeling initiative in Colorado. They spent $6 million stopping a similar effort in Oregon.   [Read more…]

Energy Democracy: Inside Californians’ Game-Changing Plan for Community-Owned Power

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Large utility companies control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California. A hybrid between a public agency and private utility, the new Community Choice program is a model for communities that want greener, cheaper energy.

By Al Weinrub / Yes!

On September 21, Pa Dwe, a 16-year-old student at Oakland’s Street Academy, spoke out against the export of coal through the Port of Oakland to City Council members: “I’m opposed to this coal export because it will make my community in West Oakland sick. I support jobs, but not the kind of jobs that make us sick. There are clean job alternatives, like Community Choice energy, and this will be good for the health of my community. This is my generation; I want to have a healthy life.”
  [Read more…]

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