Yesterday I headed toward the beach, and the air really felt better. Fresh breeze.
Breeze! 
L.A. is going through a heat spell and pollution gets cooked as it sits in the basin. Many residents speak of sinus infections, allergies, and head-aches, the stuff I routinely blame on smog. 
If you're one of us, and you can, swing by the beach, I recommend it.
Feels better than staying even a few miles inland.
Here's photos from Marina del Rey.
Pretty, aren't they?
Wherever David Freeman goes, he snaps energy efficiency into place. As President of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners, he's helped introduce the world's first all electric cargo truck.
This massive truck is the most powerful electric truck in the world.
It can lug a 60,000 pound cargo container at 40 mph., and go for 60 miles on a single hour charge.
It only takes a few hours to recharge up to four trucks at a time.
And with the extraordinary cost of diesel fuel, wow!
Global warming? This is a true no pollution big rig!
BIG news, friends.
While there are dirty ships and trucks at either end of the electric big rig, efforts are underway to clean them, too. It's all part of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles Clean Air Action Plan.
Are you listening container ports around the world?
Can you emulate the Port of Los Angeles attempts at carbon emission reductions?
If you head a port elsewhere, learn more about electric port trucks and tractors at www.portoflosangeles.org
At Port of Los Angeles there's approximately 2 million cargo truck trips within a five to ten mile range in a year. With a typical idling engine that's a lot of pollution and fuel.
Cargos of apples, Toshiba computers, not to mention tons of clothes, like a portion of Made In China items in my closet, need to be moved off the ships and into trucks.
While I'm not proud of the fact I own worldwide products that reached me through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, transported by diesel trucks-- so uncool, so uncarbon neutral, so polluting--I'm heartened to know that leadership at the Port of Los Angeles combined with South Coast Air Quality and Management is on the ball.
The electrical ball, that is.
They helped fund the non-polluting big rig, and put funding in place for more port electric vehicles. 20 tractors and 5 trucks to start, and a new plant in which to create 'em along with the coveted green job workforce.
A new tax revenue source needed by California.
Way to go.
The initial investment for this clean machine, at around half a million dollars, isn't cheap by normal standards, but nothing's normal anymore.
As Mr. Freeman has said,
"As a civilization we're on death row."
He's not talking war, he's talking disasterous effects from global warming.
The question is will we use tax dollars to fund creation of a clean sky or continue to destroy in the name of a war to keep our hands on a dwindling oil supply?
You decide, and write your representative with the answer. That's how progress continues in America.
The Port of Los Angeles' clean air efforts are impressive.
Now let's create more electric trucks and vehicles here, and everywhere. And solar and wind energy to plug into.
I have a headache.
The air quality in Los Angeles is horrible.
I wonder what the EPA web site AirNow has to say? Just checked: We're having a good smog day. Photo is from another day, probably also a good smog day. Maybe later, I'll take my camera and show you what today really looks like.
EPA's www.airnow.gov is often off the mark, yet EPA gets big bucks to keep us environmentally safe.
To clean the air, we need hybrid plug-in electric cars, clean engines, catalytic converters and fuels, and energy from renewable sources like solar, wind, and biothermal. I know this. Why doesn't the EPA?
EPA administrator Johnson wants to revamp the Clean Air Act to favor polluters. LA Times reporter Janet Wilson wrote about it here.
When thinking about where to come up with money for renewable energy subsidies to enable you and I to put solar panels on our rooftops, and buy plug-in hybrid cars, I think get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA isn't protecting public health, so let's give their 2008 budget of $7.2 billion, which doesn't even address climate change, to the people to advance the environment's and public's health, and deal effectively with climate change.
While the EPA talks about what they'll do, they don't do near enough to protect the environment to justify their jobs.
I hear a lot of talk, talk, talk.
As the EPA tries to loosen standards to favor polluters.
I've testified at hearings.
Talk, talk, talk.
At EPA hearing EPA administrators listen to people like me and others' talk, talk, talk, but does anyone listen with an ability to make a change, and if they can't make a change. Adios.
Why should they get paid to be ineffectual with our tax dollars? (I've met a few bright and well-meaning EPA employees but their hands are tied thanks to administration.)
Do I really need to explain that this is bad air to breathe, and the EPA should regulate much stricter air quality standards?
Talk, talk, talk.
I took this photo flying into L.A. last summer.
I don't know if Barbara Boxer would second my vote to abolish the EPA and come up with an impartial 3rd party entity to regulate polluters, and create incentives for non-polluting energy and activity, but I know Senator Boxer might, for she recently attacked the EPA for being ineffectual. For bedding with polluters to make polluters lives easier rather than the public's health.
I say fire them all, and devise a new system to regulate polluters and encourage non-polluting activity.
To read Senator Boxer's testimony regarding the ineffective (and criminal in my opinion) EPA, click here.
People, poets, and progressives call for action to change energy policies and consumption habits, and minimize waste.
Extreme weather to hit large populations--Burma, New Orleans, Thailand--and dislocate millions on account of global warming is real. What habit will YOU change to ensure the march toward extinction doesn't continue?
I change lightbulbs to CFLs, turn off the lights and computer more, drive less, and increase public awareness by speaking out and blogging.
www.1sky.org/mothersday was just brought to my attention. It's a grassroots effort of moms throughout the country, bringing awareness to kids and leaders as to the importance of addressing global warming now. The 1 Sky movement has impressive backers, like the inspirational climatologist, James Hansen.
Quick! On your mark, get set, go!!
Norway, Costa Rica, Iceland, New Zealand and Monaco are in the global race of our lives.
Who will be the first to go carbon neutral in order to reduce global warming?
Bets are on Costa Rica.
I bet Iceland will want everyone to the win this carbon neutrality race in order to preserve the island from melting away.
Especially they'll want the big, fat U.S.A. with its coal smoke stacks and SUV culture to win at going carbon neutral.
But we're not even in the race.
Nor were we in Kyoto.
No, no, but Obama will likely win, and we'll get into the global carbon neutral race then.
We'll mandate renewable energy and plug-in electric cars!
Yes, we're a fat culture, with uncaring leaders as of this writing, but I can report from Los Angeles that our fat-give-me-more culture is changing thanks to rising fuel costs.
Bus routes are being discovered, as if they were ancient gold mines.
Bikes are being purchased, too. And more bicyclists are getting hit. Wear your helmets!
And now the overheard conversation goes like this...
"I traded my Mercedes for a Honda Civic Hybrid. You can sell your car quick too on CarMax. You may not get the best price but you'll get into much better milage faster."
"I'm getting rid of my cars (yes people here have plural cars!) and I'm getting a Prius."
"I heard the Prius blows in a strong wind."
"But it's fun to drive, and Mary gets around 50 mpg in the city."
To read more about the race of our life time, check in with the United Nation's new Climate Neutral Network.
Companies and countries are invited to join the race to carbon neutrality now.
But...
No cheating.
No cheating by solely buying offsets for your fat lifestyle. I'm watching you.
And this cap and trade business... I'll have much more to say soon on the metaphoric eve of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Act Bill.
California's State Parks were under Gov. Schwarzenegger's "evil" eye, sorry, for he was going to axe visitors from visiting 48 of them due to a budget shortfall. But environmentalists fought back, and we won! Here's an old photo of me sort of enjoying a smoggy-cough-cough day hike. In fact it was this smog on that day that started my chase for clean air!!
So while Vancouver was busy making new laws to clean its air...
My girlfriend Arna and I met at the Bel Air Bar and Grill on Sepulveda Blvd., just steps away from the 405 Freeway where eleven lanes of traffic converge in stop-and-go traffic.
It was convenient. What can I say? So...
In the background, I imagined diesel trucks whisking colorful produce to Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, while up-and-comers commuted from the Valley to the Westside in a fog of fumes, while fancy ladies sipped wine and ordered salads, Italian dressing on the side, oblivious to the traffic hum outside.
And we entered the restaurant's covered courtyard, with twinkling lights strewn on green plants, and immediately dodged cigarette smoke.
We're both sensitive breathers, so no courtyard.
Unfortunately, smoking in restaurant patios isn't outlawed in Los Angeles like in Vancouver, British Columbia, which was voted one of the most sustainable cities in the world and most liveable, too.
Vancouver just instituted a smoking ban within 20 feet of building entry ways, bus stops, and restaurant patios!
A place I'll visit soon as my chase for clean air resumes.
While Vancouver doesn't have perfect air--they have a major port--it's much better air than Los Angeles.
We really must try harder here.
Despite our pockets of progress like in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, which outlawed restaurant patio smoking, Los Angeles--the big picture--has further to go.
A Vancouver restaurant owner can be fined $2500 Canadian dollars if someone is smoking on their property. I imagine a new job title: cigarette catcher.
America and Europe could learn from Vancouver.
One reason I'm not rushing to find clean air in Europe, is because a smoking culture dominates. Unless something changed recently.
My last European experience was in France, where it was difficult to breathe easily when trying to enjoy a meal or walk on the sidewalk.
I'm excited about Vancouver's new law, and look forward to my visit.
To read more about Vancouver's anti-smoking law, click here.
Low resolution photo courtesy of Vancouver Coast and Mountains Tourist web site. When I get to Vancouver, I'll post better, or maybe they'll send me high-resolution before then.
Pick your poison: Oil. Coal. Nuclear energy. Or choose renewable energy, instead.
S. David Freeman's refrain was heard throughout the animated night at Armand Hammer Museum where words flew about our energy problems and solutions.
Mr. Freeman's common sense and decades of energy experience debated Texan Robert Bryce, a tense man with a furrowed brow, who represented oil interests and the free market system. In other words, progress at any price.
Yes, Mr. Bryce was the voice for the free market. The careless system that brought us air pollution, global warming, radioactive waste with nowhere safe to put it, and a cancer rate in humans that went from one in eight thousand to one in three in just 100 years of toxic industrial progress.
Bryce's voice of free market progress, by default, includes increasing cancer and asthma cases along the way toward our extinction, which, apparently is okay, so long as energy prices remain low. Fossil fuel pollution? Global Warming? No problem.
I cringed as an intense Bryce spoke, for I felt he represents those who see money before dying cancer victims, dying mountaintops killed for coal, and dying ecosystems on our one planet.
Bryce lacked vision: A vision which can see 100% renewable clean energy and then figure out how to make it happen.
He seemed to say: If progress means continuing to mine cheap dirty coal (there is no such thing as clean coal), which, in turn, contributes to the destruction of mountaintops, forests, communities, lung tissue, and damns us to extreme weather conditions, with extinction of the human species at the end of a global warming ball and chain called unhealthy habits, so be it.
Let the careless market system prevail.
Hogwash.
What we need is vision and leadership.
Discernment.
Doing the right thing for the greatest good of people and the environment.
And in rode the green cowboy, S. David Freeman, on fifty years of energy experience, running electric companies (DWP & New York Power), a filthy coal company, and currently the Chairman of that ever-so-polluting port of Los Angeles.
The man who has been there done that seen it all said,
"We need to develop renewable energy as though our lives depend on them. As a civilization we're on death row. We can't have business as usual. We need energy efficiency, renewable energy, plug-in hybrids, and changes in lifestyle. Give up the materialistic lifestyle. We've run out of time folks. This is a moral issue of great magnitude. We have the ability, technology, and we need leadership."
He went on to talk about the need for government intervention, and mentioned The Manhattan Project by example of what can be accomplished with an important government goal and money. He said we can create a government program to create renewable energy for the masses.
I thought about how in the 1960s the government decided to send a man to the moon. That government "intervention" worked, too. Innovation with timelines and money works.
Freeman suggested that the next U.S. President mandate Detroit to make plug-in electric cars until we all drive one, develop Big Solar (the sun is free and prices will come down for storage and transmission) and wind power.
And we must change our lifestyles toward energy efficiency, and realize cheap energy prices may have been a luxury.
We're entering the Second Industrial Revolution based on clean, non-toxic energy.
If a show of clapping hands defines who won the Armand Hammer debate on energy, Mr. Freeman won, no hands down.
To learn more about Mr. Freeman's ideas, I recommend his book Winning Our Energy Independence: An Insider Shows Us How. I enjoyed the book and wrote a review here.
In the meantime, you decide: Progress at any price or educate leadership on how to create big renewable energy programs now.
Photo of light brown apple moth courtesy of Peter Tilley.
So a judge ordered an environmental impact report after many people got sick from aerial pesticide spraying in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties.
They sprayed the light brown apple moth and people, and 700 dead or dying birds washed to shore, and...
We don't know what the environmental impact report will find, or if the truth will prevail.
So little has made sense thus far beyond financial gain for elected officials who awarded their benefactor, a California pesticide company named Suterra, a multi-million dollar contract despite not one California crop being damaged by light brown apple moth.
Unfortunately, I wasn't told about the aerial pesticide spray before my Monterey and Santa Cruz visit in November 2007 shortly after the government contaminated the air.
As a result of being exposed to the phermone-based pesticide, I didn't get a period for three months, though it'd take me much longer to make the connection. Many women reported the same, and menopausal women as old as 65 reported getting a period.
What steps can you take?
To stop the aerial pesticide spray in Northern California, call Sam Farr if you're a resident of Monterey County and ask him to introduce bill to reclassify light brown apple moth. (831) 429-1976
Ask San Francisco Mayor Gavin to urge Rep. Pelosi to reclassify lbam and lift quarantine here and abroad. (415) 554-6141
Call Rep. Pelosi and urge her to act now to reclassify lbam. (415) 556-4862
Should the spray go through, where will Northern California people go? Especially, sensitive people.
And tourists. They'll need to find new areas to visit. If you're planning a N. California visit late this summer, think again if you care about your health. Check spray dates and locations here.
What about home-owners who will see the value of their homes in San Francisco, Marin, Santa Cruz, to a name a few spray zones, plummet?
Who'd want to buy in Toxicland? Here's first-hand report of people who got ill from Monterey spray.
Currently I'm in Los Angeles and heading for British Columbia, chasing clean air. But most of my family is in the Bay Area. My Mill Valley uncle, who has asthma, is thinking about moving to Bend, Oregon.
Where will you go if your community is illegally sprayed with toxic pesticides?
Meantime, let's make calls to above numbers to stop the spray. You can read facts on illegality of this spray, toxic impacts, and about how this moth hasn't damaged one crop yet is considered a state of emergency with federal money coming from Department of Homeland Security. $330 million for this moth and two other pests. Where will money come from when we really need it. Read more here.
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