Tag Archives: council

Richmond, Calif., fights back against Chevron’s choke hold

by ghd12australia Posted on January 3, 2013

Richmond, Calif., fights back against Chevron’s choke hold

By Susie Cagle

Chevron has dominated the town of Richmond, Calif., for 110 years, but that dominance is finally being called into question. Tensions have been escalating for decades, but came to a head after a fire in August 2012 at the oil giant’s Richmond refinery belched toxic smoke all over the Bay Area.

When Chevron sought city permits to rebuild the refinery, the Richmond mayor and City Council called for stronger pollution and safety controls. But in December, the city Planning Department approved permits that will allow the company to bring the refinery back to full production with only very minor improvements in emissions.

Last month, Chevron agreed to pay $145,600 to settle 28 different air-quality violations that had taken place at the refinery before the fire. That works out to $5,200 for each screwup, which ranged from not filing reports on hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide pollution incidents to the fact that the the oil giant didn’t check part of the refinery for leaks for two years.

For most of its 110 years in Richmond, Chevron — the town’s biggest employer and a big donor to local political campaigns — has put out fires and paid fines and not looked back, while local residents suffered from sustained health problems. Now, The New York Times reports, the winds are shifting:

“They went through a period of time when they took a very hard-line, confrontational position with the City of Richmond, and I don’t think it was working for them very well,” said Tom Butt, a councilman who has been critical of Chevron and who won re-election in November, despite the oil company’s support for three other candidates. “They were facing a situation where the majority of the City Council were not their friends, and so they decided to try a different position.”

Sean Comey, a Chevron spokesman, said the company felt the need to adopt a new strategy toward Richmond, though he did not go as far as to acknowledge that it was a direct response to the city’s changing politics.

“Probably about four, five years ago, we sat down to really reassess what the state of our relationship was with the community where we had been for more than 100 years — and it wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” Mr. Comey said.

So Chevron built some community gardens and threw some holiday parties and tried to appear really excited about civic goings-on.

“Richmond kind of gets into your blood,” said Andrea Bailey, Chevron’s manager of community engagement in Richmond. “There’s so much going on, and there’s this precipice of greatness. It’s exciting.”

And then the company was like, “But they still hate us? Whyyyy?”

Maybe because Chevron is also trying to buy the city council. In last year’s race, it spent $1.2 million and succeeded in getting two of its three preferred candidates elected.

Still, Chevron says its polling shows “favorability with over 50 percent of residents,” even after August’s fire. I wonder if Chevron is also following the #FuckChevron hashtag that’s become popular on Twitter with Bay Area residents. Best get the community engagement manager on top of that one.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See the original article here:

Richmond, Calif., fights back against Chevron’s choke hold

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Richmond, Calif., fights back against Chevron’s choke hold

From farm to table, we’re losing tons of food

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 14, 2012

From farm to table, we’re losing tons of food

By Susie Cagle

Forty percent of the food we grow in the U.S. is wasted somewhere between the farm, the table, and the garbage can. There’s the stuff Americans allow to rot in their fridges (though I know you dear and conscientious readers would never do that), but there’s also tons of food lost on the farm and in the packaging process.

ECO City Farms

A new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council surveyed crop waste at farms in California’s Central Valley. From NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

Results are by no means conclusive due to the limited data set, but they do offer an anecdotal snapshot of the extent of losses that occur. They found that “shrink,” another word for lost product, could be as low as 1 percent for the crops which were studied and, depending on weather and market conditions of a particular year, as high as 30 percent. Losses for plums and nectarines were on the high side; head lettuce and broccoli losses (at least where the farmer was selling florets separately) were relatively low.

This can translate to a lot of food. If just 5 percent of the U.S. broccoli production is not harvested, over 90 million pounds of broccoli go uneaten. That would be enough to feed every child that participates in the National School Lunch Program over 11 4-ounce servings of broccoli.

It also translates to a lot of resources used for naught. For example, if just 5 percent of broccoli grown in Monterey County, California (producer of 40 percent of U.S. broccoli) is not harvested, that represents the wasted use of 1.6 billion gallons of water and 450,000 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer (a contributor to global warming and water pollution). And let’s not forget about the energy, pesticides, land, and other resources that went into growing that food.

This amount of crop shrinkage is staggering. And to some degree it’s our own damn fault for picking only the prettiest produce at the store — the uglies never even make it to the shelves. The NRDC also points to other factors: overplanting in an attempt to hedge against pests or weather but that can end up costing more than a loss might have; shortages of skilled farm labor; spoilage that prevents farms from donating unsellable stuff; and the horrors of the “spot market” …

… where products are traded for immediate delivery without forward contracts. Prices vary significantly in this market, and growers sometimes face a tough decision just prior to the harvest window. Low spot prices can mean that the costs of harvesting a crop and getting it to market outweigh the revenue from its sale. When this is the case, a grower may decide to leave entire fields of harvest-ready product unharvested. These fields are known as “walk-bys” in the industry, and are particularly prevalent in years of high supply.

Yes, who said capitalism wasn’t moral?

Food waste is hardly an American problem. The European Union is set on reducing its own food waste, which is currently 89 million tons annually. A new project called FUSIONS — Food Use Social Innovations by Optimising Waste Strategies — aims to reduce E.U. food waste by 50 percent by 2025.

In the U.K., government officials are shockingly indignant about food waste. From The Independent:

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, deplored the amount of food we waste in a speech to the Federation of Women’s Institutes last week.

He singled out the “cult of perfection” that leaves no room in our supermarkets for ugly produce, but also said the following about the Nigellas and Jamies of this world.

“Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always have had chapters on using up scraps and leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s. That is a little tiny area where you can change culture. Lots of food can be rehashed together and it is perfectly good.”

How can we shift the tide stateside? NRDC points to needed policy and behavior changes (the prettiest apple doesn’t necessarily taste better than the homely one). There’s hope, too, in gleaners, which is a much more dignified term than “freegans.” Maybe that’s because they come from France.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Food

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Link:

From farm to table, we’re losing tons of food

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on From farm to table, we’re losing tons of food

Wanna know what’s in that fracking fluid? Tough

by Myrna Posted on December 3, 2012

Wanna know what’s in that fracking fluid? Tough

By Philip Bump

arimoore

As of last year, Texas has a law that requires fracking companies to reveal the chemicals used in their fracking fluids. Unless that fracking fluid is considered a “trade secret” by the fracking company, which, surprise surprise, companies have claimed 19,000 times in the first eight months of this year.

From Bloomberg:

A subsidiary of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NBR) pumped a mixture of chemicals identified only as “EXP- F0173-11” into a half-dozen oil wells in rural Karnes County, Texas, in July.

Few people outside Nabors, the largest onshore drilling contractor by revenue, know exactly what’s in that blend. This much is clear: One ingredient, an unidentified solvent, can cause damage to the kidney and liver, according to safety information about the product that Michigan state regulators have on file.

A year-old Texas law that requires drillers to disclose chemicals they pump underground during hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was powerless to compel transparency for EXP- F0173-11. The solvent and several other ingredients in the product are considered a trade secret by Superior Well Services, the Nabors subsidiary.

While the ability of fracking companies to hide their ingredients is not a new problem, the Texas law demonstrates its extent. The specific makeup of fracking fluid is one of the innovations that led to the current shale gas boom; it’s justifiable — in the respect that fracking can be justified — to claim that the combination of chemicals is proprietary information. The question that arises is how to balance that secrecy with public health. (A possible solution: Ban all fracking everywhere! This solution is unlikely to be adopted.)

For neighbors of fracked wells, the omissions mean they can’t use the disclosures to watch for frack fluids migrating into creeks, rivers and aquifers, because they don’t know what to look for, says Adam Briggle, who is chairman of a citizen’s group in Denton, Texas, called the Denton Stakeholder Drilling Advisory Group. …

The 19,000 trade-secret claims made in Texas this year through August hid information that included descriptions of ingredients as well as identification numbers and concentrations of the chemicals used. Overall, oil and gas companies withheld information on about one out of every seven ingredients they pumped into 3,639 wells.

And you will not be surprised to learn who thinks the legislation is just perfect as is.

Recently, more states are following the Texas model — with an assist from industry. In December 2011, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Washington-based public policy organization that brings together corporations and legislators to craft bills for states, adopted model legislation that is almost identical to the Texas rule.

The model bill was sponsored inside ALEC by Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), which also advises the council from a seat on its “private enterprise board,” according to ALEC documents obtained by Common Cause, a nonprofit group in Washington.

ALEC has long-standing ties to the fossil fuel industry, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. Nor should Exxon’s interest in protecting fracking; the company has made a big bet on natural gas.

Internationally, The Wall Street Journal reports, fracking isn’t catching on, due to a combination of shale locations and availability of technology. Exxon itself killed a project in Poland after deciding that drilling wasn’t worth it. That is good news for the rest of the world — but bad news for the United States, which becomes both a laboratory experiment and a deeply profitable business venture.

After all, there’s a massive windfall trapped in that shale. And it’s far cheaper to seek forgiveness via an eventual class-action suit than it is to seek permission by providing full information.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See original article:  

Wanna know what’s in that fracking fluid? Tough

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Wanna know what’s in that fracking fluid? Tough

Your local beach may be getting slightly cleaner, or maybe not

by Myrna Posted on November 27, 2012

Your local beach may be getting slightly cleaner, or maybe not

By Philip Bump

Dehk

Just in time for summer (in Australia), the EPA released new water quality standards for beaches yesterday.

The new guidelines lower the allowable levels of Enterococci and E. coli bacteria — if states choose to participate. From the Los Angeles Times:

The new guidelines, which update standards issued in 1986, may not immediately mean safer beaches and coastal waters. States have the authority to set their own water quality standards.

But federal environmental officials said they hoped the suggested guidance would prompt state leaders to toughen their own oversight of recreational waters where people swim, surf and go boating. California is among the states that may tighten standards. …

The tougher guidelines are expected to keep illnesses down to 32 per 1,000 people, compared with 36 illnesses for the lower standard, the agency said.

So, in short: If states apply the new guidelines, it will potentially reduce illness by about 11 percent. That’s … a little underwhelming? Come on, EPA, Obama won reelection. This is the moment to be bold!

According to the Times, the Natural Resources Defense Council is similarly unimpressed.

“It’s an odd approach,” said Steve Fleischli, the council’s director of water programs.

Fleischli said the two standards could perpetuate inconsistencies between states that adopt the tougher guidelines and those that opt for the more lenient ones.

The NRDC produces an annual report listing the dirtiest beaches in America, which is always a disconcerting read. In its report released this past June, outlining water quality in 2011, the organization found that Delaware and New Hampshire — those oceanside favorites — had the lowest levels of pollution. The most polluted water in 2011 was found in Louisiana — but we’re sure the state will jump at the optional chance to crack down on water pollution.

There is one group that will be pleased about the update: those four people out of 1,000 who don’t become sick because their state chose to allow only a lower level of E. coli at their favorite swimming hole. Yaayyy.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Living

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

View this article: 

Your local beach may be getting slightly cleaner, or maybe not

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your local beach may be getting slightly cleaner, or maybe not