Category: Environment

by Michael Steinberg

Though a meltdown at a nuclear plant may be its worst case scenario, the dangers and risks by no means end there. In fact they go on every day.
Radioactive releases into the air and water are routine at nukes. As is the transportation of radioactive wastes offsite by road, rail and water. These activities are the seldom discussed everyday threats to people, other living beings, and the environment as a whole.

This report delves into what goes on at the San Onofre Generating Station in these respects.

Think of San Diego, and your mind probably conjures images of lounging on long sandy beaches and swimming, surfing, or boating in the warm ocean water. You probably don’t think of the 180 million gallons of minimally-treated sewage that are being pumped into the Pacific Ocean, 4 1/2 miles off the coast of Point Loma, every day. That’s more than 65 billion gallons a year. You might also think, isn’t that illegal?

More than 30 years ago, Congress mandated that publicly-owned wastewater treatment plants, like the one in Point Loma, treat its wastewater to a higher standard-“secondary” standards-before discharging their treated wastewater.

Crews started cutting down more than a dozen trees surrounding the Jolly Roger restaurant at the Oceanside Harbor this week, displacing some birds that had nearly taken over the property and prompting a debate over whether the action was an outrage or a relief.

Twelve eucalyptus and two Torrey pine trees are being removed this week due to what restaurant officials said was a health and safety issue involving excessive amounts of bird feces accumulating in the area.

by Frank Gormlie and Patty Jones

When we heard what the Encinitas tree-sitter was doing, Patty and I wanted to meet him. So we drove up the coast on a beautiful day to do just that. We found Orpheus Park – about halfway between the freeway and the coast – denuded of most of its trees.

And there was Andrew Watkins hanging upside down from a large branch, along with a few other friends who had climbed up to the platform that Watkins had assembled.

San Diego environmental activists are split over the compromise between a few major environmental groups and San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders on the City obtaining a waiver for the secondary treatment of its wastewater.

On January 19th it was announced that Mayor Sanders and the Sierra Club, the Surfrider Foundation and San Diego Coastkeeper had all come to an agreement on the waiver. In December of last year, the Environmental Protection Agency had granted the City a five-year waiver on having to upgrade the sewage treatment.

Local beach residents want no part of the recent elimination of trash cans by the City of San Diego along walkways and viewpoints at the cliffs and beaches. They are registering their opposition by leaving mounds of rubbish and trash where trash cans once gallantly stood.

Nearly two weeks ago, the City of San Diego announced that it was permanently removing about two dozen trash receptacles from Ocean Beach to La Jolla. The cans removed were at walkways and viewpoints – not the actual beach and parks in between.

Water rationing probably will be imposed in San Diego by July 1, Mayor Jerry Sanders said yesterday. The reduction would vary per household depending on factors including how much water is used for landscaping. Sanders said residential and business customers alike would face “fairly significant penalties” for using too much water in the face of a drought and spring cutbacks expected from the wholesaler that provides water to the city. Sanders didn’t elaborate on what the penalties might be.

Water administrator Alex Ruiz said the rationing plan would try to take into account customers’ past conservation efforts and seek to distinguish between “discretionary” outdoor water uses and indoor uses, such as cooking and cleaning.

A more than $1 billion plan to add 10 gates, and probably a parking structure, at Lindbergh Field is scheduled before the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority in March, but it may cost another $4 billion to build out the airport that would soon be gridlocked. An airport update was presented at a Society for Marketing Professional Services meeting at the DoubleTree Hotel in Mission Valley last Wednesday.

Iraj Ghaemi, the Airport Authority’s director of facilities development, noted that with 227,000 aircraft operations, Lindbergh was the busiest single runway commercial service airport in North America in 2008.

One out of every 150 Americans was there in Washington DC yesterday, January 20, 2009. Nothing before yesterday had ever seen such a press of humanity that demonstrated on Tuesday. So many grand words have been spoken or written about President Barack Obama’s inauguration, that we dare not add anything mediocre. We had risen yesterday in anticipation, and turned on the tube early to watch history and try to be part of it. The crowds were what amazed me. Seeing faces with tears rolling down glad cheeks were what got me the most. Watching so many young Americans happy and excited, seeing so many African-Americans beaming, and viewing the plain diversity of the crowd made us all gasp with pride. The relentless chants of “Obama, Obama!” echoed my shouts into the night air the evening he was elected.

Aside from the beautiful full moon we had last week there was a very low tide over the weekend. I’m sure they’re somehow related but don’t ask me how… Frank and I took a hike on the beach south from the staircase at the foot of Ladera St. We didn’t get far before the batteries in my camera and the backups were dead, but we had a great hike and watched the sunset from the beach before making our way back up. I was happy to get these great photos of the low tide from our good friend Jeff.

Check ’em out, click on the smaller image below to see a larger version. Let us know your favorite!

In the waning moments of the Bush Administration, our Commander in Chief and his cohorts are pushing through hundreds of so-called “Midnight Rules” that could take years to change (if challenged at all by the incoming Congress and Obama Administration) and may inevitably leave a lasting mark on environmental regulation for years to come.

It is common for outgoing Presidents to pardon criminals, or push through a few last minute Executive Orders to leave a legacy. But in the traditional Dubya manner, most of these Midnight Rules are of course in the best interest of Energy Conglomerates (particularly the dirty-ass COAL industry i.e. Tennessee environmental disaster) and not in the best interest of the environment.

History will record that George W. Bush made one critically important contribution to our country — and to the entire world. He and his administration provided unquestionable proof of the bankruptcy of radical-conservative ideology, and set the stage for a qualitatively different progressive era in American politics. History is not linear. It is not gradual or evolutionary. Human progress proceeds in fits and starts like a volcano, where pressure gradually builds over years and then erupts with enormous power.
Very often those explosions of progress — periods when we expand the realm of democratic values, human dignity, economic opportunity and optimism — are precipitated by periods of domination by the forces of privilege, inequality and selfishness.

By assuring that all of the fruits of the growth of productivity in our economy went to the wealthiest 2% of our population, the Bush administration set the stage for the current economic collapse.