Last week, the seven Republicans on the 13-member board forced out AQMD Director Barry Wallerstein, long criticized by business interests as hostile and indifferent to the economic downside of heavy regulation. In December, the GOP bloc passed on staff recommendations and adopted rules on refineries and other heavy industries that had been lobbied for by the Western States Petroleum Association and other oil interests.

State Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, reacted sharply to both moves. This week, he announced plans to introduce legislation that would add three members to the AQMD board. The board now consists of 10 elected officials from cities and counties in the AQMD region as well as one member chosen by the governor, one by the Assembly speaker and one by the Senate Rules Committee.

Adding one public health expert and two “environmental justice” members to the board would likely lead to …

… more aggressive steps to curb pollution and would give the state Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown greater influence over the agency charged with protecting the health of 17 million people in the nation’s smoggiest region.

 

Under de León’s plan, two of the additional appointees would be selected by state legislative leaders. The public health member would be appointed by the governor, increasing the panel from 13 to 16 members. …

 

Recent appointees to the air board, including Highland Mayor Larry McCallon and Lake Forest Councilman Dwight Robinson, have said they want the agency to give more emphasis to the economic burden posed by tougher emissions regulations. Republicans gained a seven-member majority with the swearing in of Robinson last month following a campaign by GOP leaders to gain control of the regulatory agency.

That is from a Los Angeles Times report.

December decision triggers lawsuit from green groups

Meanwhile, the December vote against tough new emission rules has triggered a lawsuit, KPCC reports:

Southern California air has never met state and federal standards for ozone pollution, which is associated with various respiratory and health problems. In EPA-speak, it’s considered an “extreme ozone non-attainment area.” To reduce ozone pollution, the AQMD had proposed further reducing the emission of oxides of nitrogen — known as NOx. …

 

The AQMD staff had been working for three years to devise new rules that would limit the NOx that could be emitted by stationary pollution sources, mostly refineries and a cement plant. The AQMD board voted … for a proposal favored by … local refineries.

 

The WSPA proposal permits refiners and other stationary sources of pollution to emit 14 tons of oxides of nitrogen daily versus only 12 tons envisioned by the AQMD staff plan. The board also voted for a plan that relieved refiners and other polluters of a proposed requirement to install new emission controls and instead permitted them to buy air pollution credits.

 

The Center for Biological Diversity, Communities for a Better Environment, Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the AQMD over the decision. They called the staff-written proposal “the most significant smog-fighting proposal within its jurisdiction in a decade.”

 

The groups want a Superior Court judge to set aside the December NOx decision and require refineries and other stationery polluters to install equipment to reduce the amount of NOx they put out. The groups do not want the companies to be able to buy pollution credits instead.

The L.A. region has a long history of pioneering in efforts to combat smog and other air pollution. The Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District, established in 1947 — the first such agency in the nation — was the forerunner of the modern AQMD.

Air pollution in Los Angeles is generally believed to have peaked in the 1950s. Smog health alerts, once a common occurrence, are now rare. But the L.A. area still has the worst or among the worst records for air pollution of any U.S. city, depending on the category of pollutant.

But we haven’t seen some crucial context about Brown’s latest energy policy and about how the state has done in meeting the primary original goal of AB 32, the landmark 2006 state law that dictates the use of a cap-and-trade system in which emission credits are bought and sold to try to limit the gases that are believed to contribute to global warming.

The first is that business groups listened to the governor’s speech last week and came away believing that as with fracking, he is signalling he’s not necessarily in sync with the National Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. This is from a new story in the trade publication “Inside Cal EPA,” which is not available free online:

As the debate has begun, many industry groups are seeking to ensure that any new “second generation” climate and energy programs emphasize “affordable” energy, “achievable” goals, accountability for regulators and other similar approaches.

In his inaugural address, Brown appeared to acknowledge the industry concerns. “How we achieve these goals and at what pace will take great thought and imagination mixed with pragmatic caution. It will require enormous innovation, research and investment. And we will need active collaboration at every stage with our scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, businesses and officials at all levels,” he said.

‘Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution’

“Inside Cal EPA” reported that the governor’s green-energy speech was seen as reassuring in what may seem as some unlikely corners.

Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution, with California Manufacturers & Technology Association President Dorothy Rothrock underscoring Brown’s remarks by saying “our efforts to inspire technologies to reduce climate change emissions must do so without harming the vibrancy of our economy, so we must ensure that we control costs for manufacturers and not further increase the already highest electricity rates of any industrial state.”

 That’s not how the governor’s speech was described in newspaper accounts.

Meanwhile, the coverage of the speech outlining a policy billed as a follow-up to AB 32 didn’t provide much historical context for the original measure. It imposes the cap-and-trade system as part of a requirement that the state get one-third of its electricity from cleaner-but-costlier sources by 2020. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former state Senate President Darrell Steinberg, among many others, now consistently depict the law as having a primary intention of helping California develop green jobs and green industries.

But the first four “findings and declarations” in the text of the law don’t mention economic development as a goal at all. Sections 38501(a) and (b) outline the threat that global warming poses to California’s environment and core components of its economy.

AB 32 text: It will have ‘far-reaching effects’ on world

And the next two sections make explicit AB 32’s primary goal.

(c) California has long been a national and international leader on energy conservation and environmental stewardship efforts, including the areas of air quality protections, energy efficiency requirements, renewable energy standards, natural resource conservation, and greenhouse gas emission standards for passenger vehicles. The program established by this division will continue this tradition of environmental leadership by placing California at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

(d) National and international actions are necessary to fully address the issue of global warming. However, action taken by California to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will have far-reaching effects by encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.

The law did go on to say that AB 32 would help California’s tech economy by positioning the state to benefit from “national and international efforts to control greenhouse gases.”

But that hasn’t happened since 2006. Instead, as former Obama economics adviser Larry Summers wrote recently in The Washington Post, the rest of the world mostly gave up on a cap-and-trade approach as clunky and inefficient in reducing greenhouse gases. A simple carbon tax is viewed as a much smarter approach than the one California adopted with the stated intent of changing the world.

The project has finally begun construction but only after a 13-year campaign by rich liberals to block the alternative energy plant because wind turbines would mess with their wonderful view. In between their fund-raising for Elizabeth Warren and their angry letters to the editor denouncing the Koch brothers, these rich liberals are still trying to tie up the wind plant in court.

Here’s a bit of a 2003 article on the fight:

“State Sen. Rob O’Leary represents the Cape Cod region. … O’Leary says he support wind power in principle, just not at that location.

“‘The problem is that they’re going to be visible. And they’re going to be visible at night and they’re going to be visible during the day and they’re going to be lit up,’ says O’Leary.”

Only invisible power plants are acceptable in coastal Massachusetts, you see.

Save the planet? Forget that. Save the view!

Now we have the California version. State Democrats have been telling us for a generation of the urgent need to save the planet by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But Los Angeles politician Felipe Fuentes — like Rob O’Leary a Sierra Club-loving Dem — has decided that the problem with solar panels is that they’re, yunno, visible.

“Worried solar farms could overtake prized patches of open space, a Los Angeles councilman is asking the Department of Water and Power board to put off allowing new arrays that are mounted on the ground — part of its Feed-In Tariff program — until the city can make sure they mesh with neighborhoods.”

That’s from the L.A. Times. But there’s a problem for Fuentes. The sort of laws he helped get adopted while in the state Legislature don’t allow the city to interfere with people saving the planet:

“City officials say under California’s Solar Rights Act, local jurisdictions are supposed to allow private solar installations unless they harm public health or safety.”

Invasive mandates fine — for other neighborhoods

Now of course Cape Codders and Angelenos have every right to be NIMBYs. But Massachusetts and L.A. are very much hubs of the green religionists who depict those with objections large and small to their agenda as people who don’t care about Mother Earth.

Their green fervor turns out to be fleeting when they’re asked to suffer.

Who knew? Visual blight is an even bigger problem than saving the planet from evil fossil fuels.

I have heard that some journos think my criticism is unfair and/or that I am a loopy ideologue. My response: However I feel (or however you feel) about fracking, isn’t it an obligation for California newspapers to relate how the, yunno, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT feels about its safety?

Of course it is.

This weekend, I revved up Nexis to see it the media blackout continues. I searched for stories that mentioned “California” and “fracking” from June 14, 2013, to June 14, 2014:

Times, Bee and Chronicle fracking coverage

I found 132 stories in the Los Angeles Times.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a June 21, 2013 op-ed by Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Assn.

I found 124 stories in the Sacramento Bee.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a March 30, 2014, op-ed by Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association.

The Bee ran a piece from McClatchy’s D.C. bureau in late November 2013 that didn’t even raise the question of fracking’s safety; it just pointed out how widely used it was and how it was transforming the economy of several states.

So I guess that one counts, giving the Bee two stories that give the Obama perspective on fracking safety.

I found 61 stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

Two, by staff reporter David R. Baker. Another Baker piece describes Obama as a fracking supporter.

So that gives the Chronicle three.

So there were 317 stories mentioning “California” and “fracking” for the past year, and only six mentioned that the Obama administration considers if safe — and two of those were op-eds from oil trade association executives and one was a wire story.

So only Baker’s three stories amount to staff-produced journalism on California and fracking from the state’s three most influential newspapers that noted the profoundly important fact that the greenest administration in U.S. history sides with those who say fracking is safe.

Draw your own conclusions. Sure looks like groupthink to me.

Green, please-the-Sierra-Club groupthink.

By Chris Reed

A visit to the California Sierra Club’s priorities page illustrates one of the funniest and most ironic public-policy developments of our time. The club’s top three priorities are getting California “Beyond Coal,” “Beyond Oil” and “Beyond Natural Gas.” All fossil fuels are evil, you see.

But it is the gigantic boom in natural gas — not the subsidized, largely failed green energy revolution — that has helped the U.S. lead the world in reduction of the emissions believed to contribute to global warming. This reduction has come almost entirely because U.S. utilities have shifted from dirty coal to relatively clean natural gas, which is newly abundant because of hydraulic fracturing, which uses underground water cannons to free up energy supplies. The process has been around nearly 70 years but has become vastly more efficient in recent times because it has been enhanced by information technology that allows for much more precision in aiming of the water cannons. (This has also made the process much cleaner.)

Green think tank makes heretical case to green movement

Now an environmental group, the Breakthrough Institute, has broken through green dogma and put out a report making the case that it’s good to have abundant natural gas, even if it is an allegedly evil fossil fuel.

By Joseph Perkins

“VICTORY!” So reads the giddy headline on the Friends of the Earth website.

The anti-nuke environmental group is celebrating the surrender of Southern California Edison, which announced last week it will permanently shutter its San Onofre Nuclear Plant.

“This is very good news for the people of Southern California,” said Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica, in a statement.

So Cal Ed’s customers “now have the opportunity,” he said, “to move away from the failed promise of dirty and dangerous nuclear power and replace it with safe and clean energy provided by the sun and the wind.”

Of course, Pica neglected to mention how much it will cost So Cal Ed customers to replace San Onofre’s 2200 megawatts — which accounted for nearly 20 percent of the utility’s total electricity production — with solar arrays and wind farms.

First, there’s the actual cost of decommissioning San Onofre, which will amount to roughly $3.4 billion, according to Ted Craver, chief executive officer of Edison International, So Cal Ed’s parent company.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity rates, will determine how much So Cal Ed ratepayers will be forced to pay for San Onofre’s permanent shut down.

Sempra Energy, which owns 20 percent of the nuclear plant, is counting on the CPUC to allow it to recoup its $519 million stake in San Onofre by passing along the cost to its customers.

By the same coin, So Cal Ed customers can be expected to absorb a couple billion dollars or so in higher electricity rates to defray the cost of decommissioning San Onofre.

Then there are Edison International shareholders, including the California Public Employees Retirement System. They will absorb after-tax costs of up to $425 million, according to Jim Scilacci, Edison’s chief financial officer, although, he warned, further write downs are possible. Because CalPERS payouts to retirees are guaranteed by the California Constitution, at least according to most interpretations, that means all California taxpayers could be on the hook for any investment losses.

And not to be forgotten are the 1,100 San Onofre employees who suddenly find themselves jobless with the plant’s shutdown. Pica, the Friends of the Earth president, doesn’t feel their pain. That’s because he lives and works all the way in Washington, D.C., where he doesn’t see the human toll of his anti-nuke advocacy in Southern California.

Replacement

Indeed, aside from the direct cost of decommissioning San Onofre, there also is the cost of replacing the atoms the nuclear plant generated “with energy provided by the sun and wind,” as suggested by Pica and Friends.

Indeed, as So Cal Ed has previously estimated, it would take 64,000 acres of solar panels — 100 square miles’ worth — to replace the electricity San Onofre generated on its 84-acre site in San Clemente. It would take 59,000 acres of wind turbines.

And even if such a vast amount of land could be assembled by a company planning to sell “safe and clean” solar or wind, it would face the same kind of reflexive opposition from environmental activist groups that San Onofre faced.

Just last year, for instance, the North Sky River Wind project, a 100-turbine, 12,781-acre wind farm in Kern County, was hit with a lawsuit from the Center from Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife. The groups sought to block the 297-megawatt project because it posed an “unacceptable risk” to Kern’s bird population.

Similarly, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council filed suit last year against Calico Solar, which proposed to build a solar farm on 4,600 acres in the Mohave Desert. The enviros claimed the 663 megawatt project would endanger tortoises, lizards and other desert-dwelling critters.

Had Pica spoken up for North Sky River Wind, Calico Solar and other such wind and solar projects, his claim that the permanent removal of San Onofre’s 2,200 megawatts is “very good news” for the people of Southern California could be taken seriously.

That he has remained silent while other environmentalists attacked wind and solar projects suggests that Friends of the Earth is less concerned with promoting “green” energy than it is with killing nuclear energy.

By John Hrabe

The Assembly Republican Caucus, though small in number, has retained limited power in Sacramento by maintaining a united caucus on one issue: taxes.

Not anymore. A multi-billion-dollar tax extension quickly working its way through the California Legislature has Republican legislators embracing every side of the issue: yes, no and maybe so.

Even as Republican ranks have sunk to super-minority status, Assembly GOP leader Connie Conway of Tulare has been unable to maintain unity even on her party’s signature issue.

Assembly Bill 8, co-authored by Assembly Members Henry Perea, D-Fresno, and Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would extend the sunset date on more than $2 billion in taxes and fees. The additional revenue would fund alternative fuel and vehicle programs. Last week, the bill cleared the Assembly Transportation Committee on a 10-3 vote, with Assemblyman Katcho Achadjian, R-San Luis Obispo, in support and abstentions from Assemblymen Eric Linder, R-Corona, and Jim Patterson, R-Fresno.

“If Republicans can’t agree with the grassroots movement on tax hikes, what do they stand for at all?” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, asked CalWatchdog.com. “With several Republicans supporting AB 8, a multi-billion-dollar tax increase, the Republican brand may have been tarnished.”

Tax extensions

The bill would extend until January 1, 2024:

* An $8 increase in the smog abatement fee;

* A $0.75 fee increase on tire sales;

* A $3 additional fee on the annual vehicle registration fee;

* A $2 surcharge for local air districts on vehicle registrations;

* A $5 increase of the fee for special identification plates for construction equipment, farm trailers, cotton trailers, logging vehicles and cemetery equipment;

* A $10 and $20 increase for vessel registration.

The total bill to taxpayers, as calculated by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association: $2.3 billion.

Linder, who along with Achadjian signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which promises a signer’s vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes, said that there are valid arguments on both sides of the multi-billion tax increase.

“Both sides made valid arguments and raised important questions that remain unanswered,” said Linder. “This issue is too important to be rushed through and it is good that the process is still ongoing. The Legislature still has more work to do.”

A bill analysis by the Assembly Transportation Committee, which Linder oversees as vice-chairman, makes clear that the bill is considered a tax increase under Proposition 26 and is subject to a two-thirds vote.  “Because this bill extends the additional fees on vehicle and boat registrations and a portion of the tire fee, and because these fees are deemed taxes under Proposition 26, this bill requires a two-thirds vote,” the policy committee analysis states.

Why GOP tax support?

So why are some Republicans supporting or abstaining on a multi-billion-dollar tax increase?

The additional revenue would be spent on programs for the construction of hydrogen fueling stations and the Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program, which provides taxpayer-funded grants for businesses to buy new eco-friendly engines and equipment. It also postpones new regulations by the Air Resources Board, a move which is praised by businesses and criticized by environmental groups like the Sierra Cub.

“Any time there is the talk of taxes and regulations and fees, it always gives me heartache,” Achadjian said during the committee hearing. “Coming from a county that’s rich with agriculture, fishing industry, truckers going in and out, they have all benefited from these taxes. This is one time that I can attest that hard-earned monies in taxes have served its purpose.”

Achadjian, who has received campaign contributions from the California Trucking Association, made a point to recognize how the tax extension would help truckers. He said, “With the new regulations that are going to hit the trucking industry… those are the folks who employ people, those are the folks who keep the economy going, so in honor of their efforts, I am going to support the bill.”

If the Sierra Club and Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association sound like the political odd couple, they’re matched by members of the Transportation Committee. Joining Republican Assemblymen Dan Logue of Lake Wildwood and Mike Morrell of Rancho Cucamonga in opposing the bill was Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco. He believes the legislation transfers costs from corporations to taxpayers.

“Although this bill does extend some incentives for clean air programs, it can have some adverse effects that go beyond that,” Ammiano told CalWatchdog.com. “In rolling back ARB’s legitimate regulations, it weakens that important state agency. In addition, it transfers costs of some of these programs from corporations to the taxpayers.”

Coupal lamented the end of a unified Republican opposition to tax increases. “Although HJTA is a non-partisan organization with a third of its members Democrats, it has traditionally been Republicans in the Legislature that have provided the bulwark against tax increases.  No more,” he said.

The Assembly Natural Resources will consider AB 8 on April 29. The bill is supported by a long list of industry groups, including the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Association of Global Automakers, California Farm Bureau Federation, California Trucking Association, California Manufacturers & Technology Association and Western States Petroleum Association as well as by environmental organizations, such as the California Air Resources Board and Environmental Defense Fund.

By Chris Reed

So the Washington Post has a 1,500-word-plus analysis of why leaders and members of environmental groups — starting with the biggest of all, the San Francisco-based Sierra Club — are “more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind.”

But reporter Darryl Fears‘ analysis is, well, vanilla. He focuses initially on the angle that outreach is lacking and that having diverse leaders and members is not a priority of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeepers, etc.

What about the angle that cleaning up polluted minority communites in industrial areas is infinitely less of a priority for white enviros than protecting coastal view planes, gnatcatchers, snail darters, etc?

Greens pushed polluters into minority communities

That’s referenced, but only in paragraphs that offer telling detail but superficial insight:

“’We essentially have a racially segregated environmental movement,’ said Van Jones, co-founder of the nonprofit Rebuild the Dream and a former adviser on green jobs to the Obama administration. ‘We’re too polite to say that. Instead, we say we have an environmental justice movement and a mainstream movement.’

“The Sierra Club, billed as the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental organization with 1.3 million members, was founded in 1892. Like groups that followed, such as the Nature Conservancy in 1915 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, they were largely white, upper- and middle-class, and focused on the protection of wilderness areas.

“Two decades later, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring,’ alerted Americans to the impact of pesticides and toxic pollution on the environment.

“Acting on Carson’s revelations, the mainstream environmental groups helped to push chemical warehouses, pesticide companies and coal-fired power plants from rural and exurban areas, and many polluters migrated to low-income urban areas where people of color live.

“In the 1980s, the Government Accountability Office, the United Church of Christ and the Commission for Racial Justice each issued reports that established a direct link between race and the location of toxic-waste sites, according to a study on power plants and their proximity to minorities released in December by the NAACP. …

“Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University said that in 1980 all five of Houston’s landfills were in minority communities, as were six of the city’s eight incinerators. He said mainstream environmental groups he approached for help did not seem concerned.”

‘Environmental justice’ for plants and birds, not people

And why would that be? Why would those holding “mainstream environmental values” be so unconcerned about “environmental justice”? How could the suffering of humans seem less crucial than the suffering of flora and fauna?

Maybe because some humans don’t exactly trigger empathy among enviros.

Fears doesn’t go near the incendiary topic. But as I noted in a Dec. 31 article for Cal Watchdog, the fact is white environmental groups’ indifference to the interests of minorities used to be a lot worse than indifference:

“The environmental movement for decades called for zero population growth — seen as code for making minorities have fewer kids and for curbing illegal immigration. Now the rhetoric has shifted, but the history isn’t going away. Check out this Southern Poverty Law Center dossier on John Tanton, a Sierra Club activist who led’s the club’s population committee in the early 1970s before it was revealed that he was a white nationalist.”

This matters. Greens pine for the way things used to be — in many, many ways.

I think that by any objective measure, “environmental justice” — fighting the history of sticking heavy polluters in minority communities — is more important than fretting about declining numbers of gnatcatchers and snail darters. But Democratic leaders defer to environmentalists, and enviros don’t agree. Save the obscure fishies! Bugs are people too!

As for poor minorities, well, let them eat cake.

By Chris Reed

As Californians begin to appreciate the immense economic potential of the state’s underground natural gas and oil reserves, the debate will sharply intensify over the safety of hydraulic fracturing — the newly refined and improved tool used to access previously unreachable reserves. Fracking, the shorthand term for the process, involves using high-powered streams of water, with a small amount of chemicals and solids or sand, to break up rock formations thousands of feet underground.

Of the states most associated with fracking — North Dakota, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania — what has happened in the latter is of most interest to Californians. In the Keystone State, the use of fracking to tap vast natural gas reserves in an underground formation called the Marcellus Shale flourished under a liberal Democratic governor, Ed Rendell. The former Philadelphia mayor simply never gave credence to the various scare tactics used to try to block fracking and brushed off the criticism from the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page, environmental groups and others with an ideological, quasi-religious abhorrence of fossil fuels.

If Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown is to be persuaded to follow Rendell’s path, advocates of fracking need to learn from Pennsylvania and how the debate unfolded there.

Stick to the facts to counter hysterics

Advocates should argue that fracking is not perfect, but that no oil exploration is, and note that when properly regulated, it has a strong safety record. Scott Perry, who was the director of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management under Rendell, liked to respond to the harshest critique with this just-the-facts statement: “There has never been any evidence of fracking ever causing direct contamination of fresh groundwater in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.”

The argument that fracking, which is typically at a depth of 5,000 feet or more, might affect water tables thousands of feet higher isn’t one that most scientists take seriously. John M. Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor who served in high posts in the Carter and Clinton administrations and has been a key adviser to the U.S. Energy Department on fracking, says careful regulation addresses environmental fears in comprehensive fashion. He adds that fracking “is by far the biggest event that I’ve seen” in 50 years of monitoring world energy developments.

What’s striking about media coverage of fracking safety questions is how it largely ignores the fact that the Obama administration rejects the alarmism of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In House testimony in May 2011, EPA Director Lisa Jackson said she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.” The U.S. Geological Survey dismissed the idea that fracking causes earthquakes. Most definitively, a November 2011 Energy Department study concluded that there were legitimate pollution concerns surrounding hydraulic fracturing. But the concerns involved the worries about surface air and water quality and about community effects that would come with any heavy industrial project, and were not due to the deleterious effects of fracking underground.

Efficiency gains: It’s not the chemicals, it’s the computers

In explaining why fracking is so much more effective than it used to be, advocates should stress that it is a result of computing power — not more toxic and dangerous chemicals. Drillers are now able to use extraordinarily sophisticated sensors to take the equivalent of a gigantic MRI of underground rock formations, then focus their water cannons on weak spots in the formations surrounding the shale formations with natural gas and oil reserves.

Now, as in the past, by volume the chemicals and sand used are less than 1 percent of the total water used. Because of fracking’s increased efficiency, this means much less water is used than in past versions — and thus fewer chemicals.

Another claim regularly invoked by fracking critics is that the process wastes an extraordinary amount of water. But the Marcellus Shale Coalition says 90 percent of the water used is recycled, and that far more water is used in Pennsylvania on golf courses than in fracking. The recycling percentage is only going to improve as focus grows on the importance of reuse.

The ‘Goebbels’-like anti-fracking documentary

Fracking supporters can shore up their case by pointing to the intentional deception in a 2010 anti-fracking documentary, “GasLand.” The movie’s most unforgettable image is residents of a town in a heavy drilling area — Dimock, Pa. — lighting their tap water on fire, leaving the plain impression this was the result of fracking. Instead, even director Josh Fox acknowledged in an interview with McClatchy-Tribune that it resulted from local conditions unrelated to the chemicals used in fracking. Fox, however, insisted it wasn’t misleading.

Defenders of Pennsylvania’s fracking record like to bring up “GasLand” because they know it is so easily discredited. In a 2011 interview with a newspaper in Lancaster, Pa., Teddy Borawski, chief oil and gas geologist for the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, relished the chance to tee off on the documentary. “Joseph Goebbels would have been proud,” he said. “He would have given him the Nazi Award. That, in my opinion, was a beautiful piece of propaganda.”

And in the war of talking points, the fact is that fracking has actually led to the single best news on the U.S. environmental front in many years. Natural gas is much cleaner than coal and oil, and fracking has increased supplies so dramatically that it now costs only a third or less of what it did in 2008 in the United States. The result: “The amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years,” as AP reported last summer.

The irony could hardly be greater. For decades, environmentalists have argued that renewable energy such as solar and wind power are the only way to reduce the release of dangerous emissions into the atmosphere. But it is plentiful new supplies of a fossil fuel, natural gas, that has been the game changer. The U.S. has reduced carbon dioxide emissions more than any other nation since 2006, according to the International Energy Association.

California could thrive if it joins the “brown energy” revolution. The  Monterey Shale formation under the Central Valley is far bigger than the Marcellus Shale formation under Pennsylvania and other northeastern states. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 15, “The overall economic benefits of opening up the Monterey Shale field could reach $1 trillion.”

Allowing fracking to work its magic will be especially difficult in a state that is home to AB 32 and that is ground zero for regulatory excesses in the name of preventing pollution. But while governor of Pennsylvania from 2003-2011, Ed Rendell overcame reflexive green objections with his just-the-facts approach. It can work in California, too.

By Chris Reed

Politico reporter Talia Buford had a weekend analysis piece about the environmental movement’s theories on why its sweeping proposals haven’t advanced in Washington. The main thesis:

“The green movement dreams of pushing major bills through Congress on the scale of President Barack Obama’s health care reform law and the immigration overhaul expected to begin next year.

“But those issues enjoy something the green movement does not: wide and deep support across key Democratic groups, including Latinos and African-Americans. …

“The greens say their plight is less dire than the GOP’s, insisting that diversity exists in environmentalism, especially at the local level. It’s nationally that environmental organizations — and the face they present to the country — too often drive the perception that green issues are the purview of white liberals.”

Politico deserves credit for noting the fact that leaders of major U.S. environmental groups are whiter than a New Hampshire country club, reflecting their elitist values and wealth. But Buford doesn’t bring up any of the many other obvious factors on why greens and minorities aren’t bosom buddies. The short list: