Bee editorial writer Dan Morain couldn’t resist taking several cheap shots at Assemblyman Dan Logue, a Republican from the 3rd Assembly district covering all of Yuba, Tehama, Sutter, Glenn counties, and parts of Butte and Colusa counties. Logue has complained about the lack of concern over the environmental degradation associated with the pot farms. Morain responded with mockery.

“Not someone to be mistaken for John Muir, Logue led the effort a few years back to roll back AB 32, the measure to limit greenhouse gas,” Morain said. “Cagey politician that he is, Logue also knows an issue when he sees it.”

Characterizing this as political opportunism on Logue’s part instead of a politician reacting to constituents’ concerns is snide and unfair. There is also this angle: Would you want to be known as the politician vociferously outing cartel-planted pot farms? We know what happens to the good guys in Mexico. Logue deserves credit, not cheap shots.

Too dangerous to deal with?

Money, unsurprisingly, is driving this problem. Marijuana is the largest cash crop in the state. The annual crop is approximately 8.6 million pounds —  worth about $14 billion, according to a 2010 RAND study.

The California health and safety code does not allow any individual or group to cultivate or distribute marijuana for profit. But a big problem is the ambiguity of the cultivation law. “Cultivation of any amount of marijuana is a felony under Health and Safety Code 11358. People who grow for personal use are eligible for diversion under Penal Code 1000 so long as there is no evidence of intent to sell.” However, the law does not specify a fixed plant number which limits for personal use. This has led to people creating small pot collectives by pooling numerous permits for a larger growing area.

Yet unlike the Bee’s Morain, other reporters have noted that the problem is driven by organized crime — specifically, Mexican cartels.

The Associated Press recently detailed the extent of the problem in Butte County. “With parts of Northern California’s scenic hillsides illegally gouged by bulldozers for marijuana grows, frustrated local officials asked the state for help to protect streams and rivers from harmful sediment and the chemicals used on the pot plants,” the AP said. “As in many rural counties in California, marijuana farms are becoming more and more plentiful. They proliferate in the high Sierra, where armed Mexican cartel operatives clear wilderness areas, divert creeks and poison wildlife.”

Logue told me what the pot growers are doing to rural counties amounts to strip mining. “It looks like the Malakoff Diggins,” California’s largest hydraulic mine, Logue said of the forest areas where pot farms are located.

They are trashing forest areas, illegally cutting trees normally protected by the state, and dumping illegal poison into streams and creeks. Hillsides are illegally stripped by bulldozers for marijuana farms, creating significant erosion problems.

Environmental laws going unenforced

But county and state officials are not enforcing the state’s laws against any of this.

“Frustrated local officials asked the state for help to protect streams and rivers from harmful sediment and the chemicals used on the pot plants,” the AP reported.

“They hoped to charge growers under federal and state clean water regulations with tougher penalties than the infractions local officials could impose. But they were rebuffed.”

“It’s too dangerous, the state agency in charge of protecting the region’s water said in a letter to county supervisors.”

“’We simply cannot, in good conscience, put staff in harm’s way,’ wrote Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board Executive Director Paula Creedon,” reported the AP. “The state’s nine regional water boards are quasi-independent agencies that set their own policies, though all are charged with enforcing the federal Clean Water Act and its California equivalent.”

Some county officials said they are concerned about the harassment of legitimate, legal property owners, while the state ignores the illegal pot farmers, and the destruction they are causing.

Logue said he got involved because of the refusal by the water board to act, and sent a letter to to Creedon expressing concern over the “diminishing water quality in this part of my district.” He asked the agency to help find a way to enforce the Clean Water Act. Logue has also asked for a meeting with members of Gov. Jerry Brown’s staff in an attempt to force action.

“This has to be fixed,” Logue said in an interview. “We have an issue in the state where agencies are fearful, and the law isn’t being applied equally.”

“Why aren’t they protecting the environment now?” Logie asked.

 ‘Compassionate Use Act’ cleared way for cartels

California Proposition 215, also known as the Medical Use of Marijuana Initiative or the Compassionate Use Act, was passed by California voters in 1996.

The passage of Proposition 215 was considered a significant victory for medical marijuana. It exempts patients and defined caregivers who possess or cultivate marijuana for medical treatment recommended by a physician from criminal laws which otherwise prohibit possession or cultivation of marijuana. Because of Proposition 215, California is one of the fourteen states that allow marijuana for medical uses.

When California’s Prop. 215 was on the ballot in 1996, the Los Angeles Times did a story on wealthy large donors to the cause, including the biggest contributor, George Soros. “The campaign’s biggest donor is George Soros, a billionaire international investor and New York philanthropist who donated $550,000 to Proposition 215,” the LA Times said. “He also contributed $430,000 to a medical marijuana measure that is on the ballot in Arizona.”

Most recently, California voters defeated Proposition 19, the “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” on the Nov. 2, 2010 California statewide ballot.

April 19, 2013

By Josephine Djuhana

The war on plastic bags has returned with a vengeance, as legislators introduce new regulations that dictate what kinds of bags California shoppers are allowed to use when out shopping for groceries.

SB 405, authored by state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, would effectively prohibit stores from providing a single-use carryout plastic bag to customers. According to a press release on Sen. Padilla’s website:

* “Beginning January 1, 2015, grocery stores and pharmacies would be prohibited from making available single-use plastic bags. If paper bags are offered to customers, they would have to include recycled content and customers would have to be charged the actual cost of providing the recycled paper bags.

* “Beginning July 1, 2016, convenience stores and liquor stores would be required to meet the same standard.

* “The bill would not pre-empt local ordinances already in place.”

“SB 405 will help protect our environment by phasing out single-use plastic bags in California,” said Padilla. “Single-use plastic bags fill our landfills, clog inland waterways, litter our coastline, and kill thousands of fish, marine mammals and seabirds.”

Hearing

The hearing for the bill occurred on Wednesday, and SB 405 has since passed the Senate environmental quality committee on a 5-3 vote. The bag ban, however, has been met with some bipartisan opposition, and many members of the business community have come against it.

Cathy Browne, general manager at plastic bag maker Crown Poly Inc., called SB 405 “misguided legislation” that was not fact-based. In a press conference call on Tuesday, she warned that 300 Angelenos would be put out of manufacturing jobs if the bill was made law. “Our employees … work very hard at their jobs, and they shouldn’t lose their jobs just because politicians are listening to environmental rhetoric,” she said.

“Plastic bag bans are simply bad public policy,” said Mark Daniels, chairman of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, during the call. “To date, the debate on plastic bags has been supported by unfounded stats, junk science and myths. The reality is that American made plastic bags are a better choice for the environment and banning them will cause more harm to the environment. If California wants to lead in the fight against global warming, banning plastic bags will have the exact opposite effect.”

More than 72 California cities and counties have adopted ordinances to ban the use of plastic bags, among them a number of beach cities, including Huntington Beach.

“As a conservationist and local surfer in Huntington Beach, I’ve heard from my district that these bag bans are not the appropriate approach,” Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, told me. “While these bans are addressing less than .5 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream, we are exposing people to serious health risks and stressing Southern California water conservation efforts. There is a far bigger picture that needs to be considered and not just settle on a single issue when voting on these bans.”

Environmental concerns

Bag bans are largely introduced as a measure to preserve the environment and prevent plastics from clogging inland waterways, filling up landfills and becoming floating marine debris. But there are many devils in the details, and banning plastic bags actually may be more costly to the environment, and result in more waste and energy expenditure.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance made the following findings on plastic bags:

* Plastic bags produce fewer greenhouse gases than paper or cotton bags.

* Plastic grocery bags require 70 percent less energy to manufacture than paper bags.

* The production of plastic bags consumes less than 4 percent of the water needed to make paper bags.

* Plastic bags generate 80 percent less waste than paper bags.

* For every seven trucks needed to deliver paper bags, only one truck is needed for the same number of plastic bags.

* American plastic bags are made from natural gas, not oil. In the U.S., 85 percent of the raw material used to make plastic bags is produced from natural gas.

APBA Chairman Mark Daniels also highlighted the fallacies in using reusable bags. He said the reusable bags are often “made to look like cotton” but are, in actuality, made of nonwoven poly-propylene, which is essentially a plastic. Additionally, many reusable bags cannot be recycled and “are mostly shipped from overseas and are made from foreign oil.”

Health concerns

The science behind reusable bags belies a more insidious impact that plastic bag bans have brought. Not only are reusable bags less energy-efficient to produce and more harmful to the environment, multiple reports have shown that reusable bags spread disease. And Californians need not look further than San Francisco to see the potential health hazards caused by contaminated reusable bags.

Research by Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright showed that reusable bags “contain potentially harmful bacteria, especially coliform bacteria such as E. coli.” In fact, since San Francisco County banned plastic bags in 2007, the researchers found that “both deaths and ER visits spiked as soon as the ban went into effect” and that, relative to other counties, “deaths in San Francisco increase by 50-100 percent, and ER visits increase by a comparable amount.”

Then, consider a case in Oregon, where a girl on a soccer team got sick and “spent six hours in a chaperone’s bathroom” suffering from “vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps”:

“The soccer team of 13- and 14-year-olds traveled to Seattle for a weekend tournament in October 2010.

“At the tournament, one girl got sick on Saturday and spent six hours in a chaperone’s bathroom. Symptoms of the bug, often called “stomach flu,” include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. The chaperone took the girl back to Oregon.

“On Sunday, team members had lunch in a hotel room, passing around the bag and eating cookies it held. On Monday, six girls got sick.”

A 2011 study did show that washing reusable bags would reduce bacteria by 99.9 percent, but considering that only 3 percent of people actually wash their bags, health problems still abound.

Rise of regulations

Despite mounting concerns on banning plastic bags, California legislators continue on this quest. From foie gras to frisbees, state lawmakers see no area of private life where government does not have a place even in spite of Governor Jerry Brown’s public admonishment that not every human condition is deserving of a new law. We don’t yet have to worry about California regulating Big Gulps like Mayor Bloomberg  did in New York, but if the State Legislature can justify banning plastic bags in the interest of the public good, so too could it justify soda next.

By Katy Grimes

In the wee hours of the night, at the end of the last legislative session, language was added into a bill to push forward reforms to California’s 40-year old environmental policy, the California Environmental Quality Act.

The reforms were sponsored by the CEQA Working Group, a business-labor-government coalition.  Intended to reduce frivolous environmental litigation and duplicative government oversight, the reforms ended up being part of a smoggy deal.

Before anyone could stop them, the Democratic leadership swooped in on the bill and changed it.

SB 317

Because of California’s stringent environmental laws and project-killing local planning requirements, nearly all public and private projects in the state are legally challenged under CEQA, even when a project meets all other environmental standards of state law.

SB 317, co-authored by Sen. Michael Rubio, D-Shafter, a gut-and-amend bill, would not have actually changed CEQA, but instead would have introduced a companion law to dictate how CEQA is enforced. The new legislation would have restricted certain types of lawsuits, and would have exempted some projects from CEQA review, as long as those projects conformed with local planning and zoning codes.

It was essentially a tort reform bill just for CEQA, specifically addressing the act’s legal abuse.

CEQA is often called “the tort lawyer full employment act.” Most efforts for CEQA reform stem from the volume of frivolous lawsuits by opponents not always motivated by environmental protection. Most often, political and personal issues motivate the zealots who file CEQA lawsuits. They are willing to dramatically complicate and even halt development projects of all kinds, just because they can.

What is CEQA?

What started 40 years ago as a reasonable idea has transformed into one of the more putative forms of business regulation in the state.

The California Environmental Quality Act, enacted in 1970, requires that state and local agencies analyze the potential to harm the environmental of any development project, and identify measures to reduce that harm.

There are now 17 areas of environmental concern and 84 criteria in CEQA, including water, air quality, animal life, plant life, hazardous materials and even traffic.

Since CEQA’s 1970 passage, the Legislature has enacted more than 120 additional environmental laws. Most of California’s environmental laws are far more stringent than mandated by federal law, which SB 317 sought to address.

SB 317 claimed that federal laws are better at ensuring environmental compliance than CEQA. “Environmental laws and regulations identify compliance obligations that apply uniformly to similarly situated projects and activities … and thereby provide greater clarity than the project-by-project ad hoc review process that was created for CEQA in 1970,” the bill states.

SB 317 criticized CEQA duplicating environmental impact studies.

Even some in the Democratic Party want to see CEQA reforms, and acknowledge privately what a disaster it has been. But Capitol insiders say the political reality is that nothing is going to change because of a couple of powerful Capitol staff members who really control CEQA.

CEQA “Lipperized”

Often called the “41st senator,”  Kernan “Kip” Lipper, Senate President Darrell Steinberg’s executive staff director, is the godfather of California’s environmental bills.

Lipper is officially classified as an “environmental consultant” to the state Senate.  Any environmental bill that has come out of the Legislature in the last decade has only done so because Lipper allowed it, or because he made it happen. “Lawmakers used to jokingly ask whether a bill had been ‘Lipperized’ — and they still say that, only no longer in jest,” Capitol Weekly reported in 2010. When a bill becomes “Lipperized,” it is altered into a far different bill than the original. Or the bill will die in a committee upon Lipper’s orders.

“’He has more influence than some senators,” said state Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks, “but that’s not necessarily a compliment,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2009. ” ‘You can’t fault Kip for being good at what he does,” Strickland said, “but I personally believe the voters would rather that the power lies with the people they elected.’”

Gifts to friends

On Sept. 13, SB 317 appeared to have been “Lipperized,” as it was sent to a dark corner of the Senate closet. Simultaneously, Steinberg appointed Rubio as Chairman of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee.

The EQ committee “has jurisdiction over environmental quality, air quality, water quality, integrated waste management, toxics and hazardous waste,” a Senate press release said. “In upcoming weeks and prior to the beginning of the next legislative session, Senator Rubio will host several introductory roundtable meetings and hearings throughout California to learn from environmental groups, businesses and residents what environmental issues are of concern in their area.”

Oddly, the press release also said, “Senator Rubio also looks forward to working closely with all stakeholders to strengthen the core purpose of the California Environmental Quality Act to protect the environment, while eliminating abuses that inhibit economic growth in the state.” Could that have been a warning?

Many in the state say that CEQA reform is not possible given the existing unelected circumstances of legislative control. In the coming months, Californians will see if lawmakers’ talk of CEQA reform is more spin, or if California’s most stringent environmental law will be loosened to allow some economic recovery in the state.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California policy makers are busy mandating wind and solar farms in its deserts. But along its coastline, the Water Quality Resources Control Board is busy enforcing inconsistent environmental policy right out of George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm.”

Orwell wrote: “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”

So it seems with the California Water Quality Resources Control Board’s apparently inconsistent policy of mandating that 19 California coastal power plants must stop using ocean water to cool their steam-generating power plants (called “once through cooling” technology) in order to protect marine life.

At issue is a mandate from the California’s State Water Resources Control Board to stop the loss of 57 seals, sea lions or sea turtles per year from ocean water intake systems to cool steam-generated coastal power plants. By contrast, California’s projected 18,000 wind turbines would kill more than 75,000 birds per year with no consistent order to halt such impacts. (That’s estimated at 4.27 bird kills per turbine per year by Nature Magazine.)

Instead, the Water Board is requiring coastal power plants to use either costly fresh water or air-cooling systems to protect marine life from being sucked into its water intake pipes. With fresh water resources in short supply along California’s coastline and a seeming official definition that drought is perpetual, it seems inconsistent to mandate a switch to costly fresh water or precious groundwater supplies to cool coastal power plants.

Only a Water Board in California could come up with a regulation to import river water hundreds of miles away from the Colorado River or the Sacramento Delta to cool power plants next to the ocean to protect a few seals and turtles. Biologists might say that this policy just results in taking fresh water from salmon populations in the Sacramento Delta.  But the Water Quality Act doesn’t factor environmental tradeoffs into its regulations.

There are groundwater basins near power plants along the urban coastline, but drawing water from them for power plant cooling might create another problem: sea water intrusion into local water aquifers. There is no way under the Water Quality Act to consider whether environmental regulations create even worse environmental impacts. Every solution breeds new and sometimes even worse problems.

Rejecting Alternatives

Despite an appeal to no less than the U.S. Supreme Court, the Water Board has thus far rejected the use of a cost-benefit analysis or less costly alternative mitigation methods to protect marine wildlife.  The Water Board’s policy might be internally consistent with its interpretation of the Water Quality Act but, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, is it “a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of foolish minds”?

What is the reason for such a double standard of protecting marine life but not bird life described above? Is it to further an environmentalist agenda to bring the cost of nuclear energy and natural-gas-generated power more equal to green power so that it can compete in the electricity market?

Or is shutting down California’s two non-polluting nuclear power plants possibly just to appease nuclear power opponents? There is no way to know. It certainly is environmentally inconsistent and makes no economic sense.

California has an inconsistent policy of no oil drilling platforms within visual distance of its coastline unless camouflaged, and a zero tolerance policy for any loss of marine life from coastal power plants.

On the other hand, California does not have the same standard for large wind or solar farms in desert areas with visually blighting win turbines and solar panels and the accompanying loss of bird life and disturbance of turtle habitats.

Nor does it seem consistent when geothermal power plants in northern California require 11 million gallons of additional “treated wastewater” from a 30-mile pipeline from the City of Santa Rosa. And to think that environmentalists are concerned about the impacts of oil and gas “fracking” on deep subterranean water supplies that are no source to plant or animal life and would be diluted in any event.

One can rationalize the inconsistent policy of the State Water Board by saying that it must comply with the Federal Water Quality Act while wind farms must only comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  But if the loss of a small number of marine mammals and fish is really an issue, then why not just prohibit commercial fishing or fresh water sport fishing?  All animals are equal, aren’t they?

Delta Smelt

Or what about the environmental lawsuit that resulted in a court-ordered shutdown of 90 percent of water deliveries to farms and cities from 2007 to 2010 to protect a few tiny sardine-like smelt fish in the Sacramento Delta?

According to those who filed the lawsuit, the smelt had become nearly extinct from the Delta due to the hydraulic pumps on the California Aqueduct. But the smelt uses its small size and transparency to hide from predator fish and concentrate in cooler deep water during droughts, according to Peter B. Moyle, “Inland Fishes of California,” p. 228.

No mention was made in the media that cutting 90 percent of water deliveries probably wiped out uncounted thousands of striped and largemouth bass, catfish, carp, bluegill and crappie fish that live in the California Aqueduct. Environmental protection is a highly selective and inconsistent process in California.

If archaeologists thousands of years from now have to excavate a 300-mile pipeline to provide cooling water to coastal power plants, they would be mystified at finding a rational answer for it without understanding the politicized bureaucratic culture that produced it.

We can’t look to so-called environmental science or the legalistic scripture of the Federal Water Quality Act to understand all the inconsistencies and absurdities in energy and water policies in California. Sometimes we can find insight in novels such as Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” where the main character writes in a letter to a friend: “In short, when a person is always to deceive, it is impossible to be consistent.”

It is apparent that politics, not impacts to plant or animal life, is what really drives environmental policy in California.