San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Activism / Environment

An FAA FOIA Request Update: 218 Days and Counting and No End in Sight

by

Foolishly believing that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) makes timely decisions, a friend and I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FAA on July 29, 2017. Why? To gather info to comment on the County of San Diego 2018 McClellan-Palomar Master Plan.

We asked for the records showing what the FAA knew about the County of San Diego opening three landfills on McClellan-Palomar Airport for a 14-yeard period in the 1960s and 1970s.

Why this request? Because the County of San Diego has received more than $30 million in FAA funds and agreed to FAA grant conditions. And the County now wants at least $70 million more to extend and relocate its Palomar runway 800-feet. One FAA grant condition says: Don’t use airport property for non-airport purposes.

We also asked for an FOIA fee waiver. The feds charge for records unless an FOIA fee exemption applies. Two exemptions should apply. Reporters with a demonstrated history of informing the public of community issues qualify for an exemption. FOIA fee waivers also apply when records are requested that further a significant public interest.

One week after our request, the FAA West Coast FOIA office denied it. On August 3, 2017, we filed our appeal with the FAA in Washington, D.C. As of March 9, 2018, the FAA official position is: We’re still reviewing the issues.   [Read more…]

Readers Write: San Diego Legislators Lead the State on Environmental Justice

by

Ana Reynoso / Environmental Health Coalition

San Diego, often celebrated as a green city, is home to neighborhoods overburdened with toxic pollution, disproportionately high rates of asthma, limited affordable housing, and a failing transit system. In October 2017, with the leadership of Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, San Diego moved closer to rectifying these injustices.

I first experienced urban inequities and environmental injustice growing up in a low-income household in upstate New York. My hometown, Albany, is a historically disinvested city. The transportation of fracked oil exposes communities along its path to major risks of derailment, oil spills, and explosions. My single mother worked long hours to feed my brother and I. For years, we depended on donations of unhealthy food from church pantries. Back then, I did not have the language to describe that my city’s food desert and crumbling infrastructure restricted our access to healthy food and an effective and affordable transportation. As I got older, I learned policy and organizing could change these circumstances.   [Read more…]

The Time Has Come to End Old-Growth Logging in our National Forests

by

By Peter Brownell / Medium

A year ago today, my grandfather, Chuck Johnstone, passed away after spending most of his 93 years in Alaska. He was quintessentially Alaskan, doing the hard jobs that needed doing: he dropped out of high school to work in a gold mine. He served in the Navy during WWII. He served as dogcatcher, police chief, and deputy US Marshal. He worked as a logger and in a pulp mill. He worked in construction. He was the captain of a pilot boat.

He (and my grandmother Alice) also made it their lives’ work to protect some of Alaska’s most beautiful and ecologically significant places. They lived in Sitka, a small coastal fishing town nestled in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, a 17 million acre tract of public land that is home to ancient spruce, cedar, and hemlock trees, brown bears, humpback whales, bald eagles, and all five species of Pacific wild salmon.

Although it was not always a popular position to take in a small town where the pulp mill was the largest employer, my grandparents were founding members of the Sitka Conservation Society (SCS). Together with friends and neighbors, they persuaded Congress to designate the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness Area within the Tongass National Forest, protecting that area of the region’s unique temperate rainforest from logging, and preserving spawning streams that serve as nurseries for the wild salmon that are the basis of Alaska’s multi-billion dollar commercial and sport fishing industries. In 2010, my grandparents accepted the US Forest Service’s Bob Marshall Award for Champions of Wilderness on behalf of SCS.   [Read more…]

An Open Letter to the Bellwether State | Dear Ohio, Part 3

by

Dear Ohio,

This is my third letter to you, my sister state. Oh, I know you don’t think of California as your sister state, but in the now-forgotten context of a United States of America, we are all sister (and brother?) states, right? Being our bellwether election state, Dear Ohio, you have a special importance for us all.

I was reading about the Lowmillers the other day. You probably know of them. They run a dairy farm their granddaddy and daddy started in 1942 in Columbiana County, Ohio. They’re very proud of it, and they’ve won awards for their farming excellence. But one day when one of the Lowmillers was hunting rabbit on his land with his cousin, they noticed the hunting dogs never stopped once to drink from the stream. And the Lowmiller boy said he got to thinking, “I kinda know what’s going into that stream.” It was runoff from manure produced by the dairy herd.   [Read more…]

‘A Big Scare Tactic’: ExxonMobil Files ‘Conspiracy’ Counter Suits Against Climate Defenders

by

ExxonMobil has named the supposed “coordinated” campaign against them “The La Jolla playbook”

By Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

In response to a series of lawsuits aimed at holding the oil giant to account for its climate crimes, ExxonMobil is taking “a bare-knuckle approach rarely seen in legal disputes” by threatening and filing countersuits against those who have sued them.

ExxonMobil “has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits, or demands for sworn depositions,” based upon claims that “the lawyers, public officials, and environmental activists are ‘conspiring’ against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign,” Bloomberg reports.   [Read more…]

Diablo Canyon – the Last California Nuke – Is on Its Way Out

by

By Michael Steinberg /Black Rain Press

Diablo Canyon. The last of California’s nuclear power plants is on its way out.

The year began with a bang in Cali. Pretty much all the state’s major media outlets, as well as others across the nation, carried it as their lead story.

My personal favorite was this headline from the January 11, San Diego Union-Tribune: “Nuclear Power receives its death sentence in California: regulators vote to shut down Diablo Canyon.” This from a publication that once promoted itself as “the eyes and ears of the CIA!”   [Read more…]

SDG&E’s Pipeline 3602 Needs to Be Stopped

by

Calling on all San Diegans to unite in resisting the construction of Natural Gas Pipeline 3602!

The construction of Pipeline 3602 (PL 3602) prolongs antiquated and maladaptive technology that flies in the face of reason. This project is being pushed by purely profit-motivated business executives trapped in the past. Their primary concern is certainly not the welfare of San Diegans.

The consensus of 15,000 scientists worldwide is that we have limited time to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions or we jeopardize our very existence. We must begin a radical decline in carbon emissions by no later than 2020 to have any chance of preventing the worst effects of climate change. That radical decline entails, among other things, stopping any new infrastructure that perpetuates the fossil fuel economy. This includes PL 3602.

Aside from the climate effects of facilitating burning more fossil fuels, building PL 3602 would be expensive and put peoples’ health at increased risk because of the effects on air quality from burning natural gas. And the proposed alternate routes would infringe upon our precious open space.   [Read more…]

Cape Town Water Wars: A Literal Shitstorm | Video Worth Watching

by

This first brief Chronicle Digital video is from October of last year, but succinctly describes how Cape Town came to be in the predicament it now faces: an insufficient supply of potable running water for the city.

This second video from The Real News channel is from just a few weeks ago and presents updated information on the situation from Patrick Bond, professor of Political Economy at Wits University in South Africa. Currently the estimated “Day Zero” is April 20th. That’s when the plan would call for setting up 200 water distribution sites for this city of 4 million people.

Can California learn from the events that Cape Town is experiencing? Consider what effects a water shortage would have on issues such as food production, tourism and other aspects of the economy. In the Cape Town region 60% of the water is reserved for agriculture, chiefly for the cultivation of grapes for wine and rooibos (redbush) for herbal tea. Is that supportable given the limited resources?

When people begin to grasp the nature of this struggle for resources, and as corporations attempt to profit from this situation, how will people fight back? What weapons do the poor have?   [Read more…]

You Can’t Get Clean Energy From Natural Gas!

by

By Edward Bergen / SD350

In retrospect, branding the toxic gas that emerges from underground deposits as “natural gas” was a stroke of marketing genius. It sounds so, well, natural. But natural gas is much more like “organic tobacco” – harmful in any form.

The more experts study natural gas, the more evidence they find that this fossil fuel is inflicting great damage on our environment. It is damaging when it’s burned and damaging when it’s extracted from the ground. In fact, the extraction and burning of natural gas to produce electricity is a dirty process. This dirty process impacts the clean water and air we need to live.   [Read more…]

Ticking Time Bomb at San Onofre Nuclear Plant

by

The seaside nuclear reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente were permanently shut down in 2013 following steam generator malfunction. What to do with the 3.6 million pounds of highly radioactive waste remains an epic problem, however, pitting concerned citizens against Southern California Edison, the California Coastal Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Edison operates San Onofre, the Coastal Commission is charged with protecting the coastline, and the NRC is responsible for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel and protecting the public.

The Problem
A reactor’s spent nuclear fuel must be stored safely for 250,000 years to allow the radioactivity to dissipate. San Onofre’s nuclear waste has been stored in containers 20 feet under water in cooling pools for at least five years, the standard procedure for on-site temporary storage. Long-term storage necessitates transfer to fortified dry-storage canisters for eventual transportation to a permanent national storage site which, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government is under obligation to construct.   [Read more…]

California’s Burning: What Will Rise from the Ashes?

by

Welcome to the future.  

That’s the thing I’ve been thinking to myself as the frenetic news cycle over the past year has veered from political chaos to natural disaster and back again in a vertigo-inducing downward spiral.  Increasing social division domestically as the rich pillage the rest of us, the intensified threat of international conflict, the brazen plundering of the commons, and utter disdain for the natural world amidst a myriad of sexual harassment scandals and horrifying mass shootings are punctuated by catastrophic natural disasters from the epic fires to supercharged hurricanes and yet more fearsome firestorms.  

Reality is exceeding the capacity of our dystopian imaginations.   [Read more…]

KPBS Honors Our Everyday Hero: Diane Takvorian

by

By Environmental Health Coalition

This week, KPBS recognized Environmental Health Coalition’s Executive Director Diane Takvorian as its environmental sustainability community hero.

For more than 37 years, Diane has empowered community members living in low-income neighborhoods of color.

She credits her passion for social justice to her own family’s struggles that stretch back to the early 1900s. Her grandparents survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and came to the United States two years later. Diane and her parents lived in Pasadena, where she says she experienced some discrimination because of her ethnic background.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry