Environmental Year in Review
The Year Industry Rolled Over Us By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Los Angeles and Port of Los Angeles officials turned out for the unveiling of the newly name of the City Dock 1 marine science center as name as AltaSea. File photo.
Environment in Review/ to p. 17
from previous page
Massive Cold Spell Linked to More Global Warming if the ports simply meet the goals they proudly claim they are going to. On March 7, the Port of Los Angeles Board unanimously approved the controversial BNSF off-dock rail project—the Southern California International Gateway—and the Los Angeles City Council followed suit on May 8, voting in favor 13-2, despite strong adverse testimony on several fronts, including the City of Long Beach, Long Beach Unified School District and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, as well as a number of environmental organizations, most notably, the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Coalition for Clean Air and East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. It marked the first time the AQMD had ever opposed a significant project at the final approval stage. But it didn’t end there. Subsequently, all those just named filed suit to block the project from going forward. Possible additional text on current status to be added here. Negotiations have not resolved the matter, which is still headed for trial. On Nov. 1, nurses organized by the California Nurses Association represented a new force joined with environmental justice activists and others speaking out against the possible largescale refining of tar sands in the Harbor Area before the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. AQMD staff responded by explaining that the Valero application was both incomplete and on hold at Valero’s request. They promised to meet with the nurses to discuss the application in depth, which they had previously done with several environmental groups. AQMD also promised an open public comment hearing before any decision on a permit is made. This year, the California legislature passed a last-minute, limited package of “reforms” to the California Environmental Quality Act—the law controlling the environmental review process—with absolutely no support from the environmental community. With his more balanced, comprehensive CEQA reform bill facing business opposition, Sacramento Democrat Darrell Steinberg, president pro tem of
The first big weather story of the new year concerns a massive influx of cold Artic air affecting most of the country east of the Rockies, likely affecting weather patterns for up to two months to come. It’s most likely yet another piece of evidence of increased global warming. As explained by Andrew Freedman at ClimateCentral.org, what’s occurring is an event known as sudden stratosphering warming, in which the polar vortex of westerly winds in the winter hemisphere suddenly slows down or even reverses direction over the course of a few days. “While the physics behind sudden stratospheric warming events are complicated, their implications are not: such events are often harbingers of colder weather in North America and Eurasia,” Freedman wrote. “The ongoing event favors colder and possibly stormier weather for as long as four to eight weeks after the event, meaning that after a mild start to the winter, the rest of this month and February could bring the coldest weather of the winter season to parts of the U.S., along with a heightened chance of snow.” But cold weather does not mean an end to global warming, quite the opposite. “Sudden stratospheric warming events take place in about half of all Northern Hemisphere winters, and they have been occurring with increasing frequency during the past decade, possibly related to the loss of Arctic sea ice due to global warming,” Freedman noted. “Arctic sea ice declined to its smallest extent on record in September 2012.” While cold grips the continental United States, warmer temperatures are being experienced farther north. “[W]eather maps show a strip of orange and red hues, indicating above-average temperatures, across parts of the Arctic, Scandinavia, Europe and Asia,” Freedman reported. “The forecast high temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Monday was in the 20s Fahrenheit — warmer than many locations in Georgia and Alabama. That fits in with the so-called ‘Arctic Paradox’ or ‘Warm Arctic, Cold Continents’ pattern that researchers first identified several years ago. Such patterns bring comparatively mild conditions to the Arctic while places far to the south are thrown into a deep freeze.”
January 10 - 23, 2014
project. Not only would the residents of the new project be potential victims of a future disaster, they also would have no financial protection. In addition to further critical analyses from Connie Rutter, a retired oil industry consultant who has become a leading community advocate for closing or moving Rancho LPG, Random Lengths also published critical expert analyses from Carl Southwell, president of the Risk and Policy Institute, and from University of California professor emeritus Robert Bea, a national leader in the field of risk analysis and management. “A facility like this shouldn’t be built near population centers,” Southwell told Random Lengths. “The best response to a disaster is to try to prevent one.” Bea explained how the catastrophic risk posed by Rancho LPG exemplifies a much broader pattern of “risk creep,” where a complex system gradually becomes increasingly dangerous through time, in large part due to poorly-understood problems with the interfaces between basic subsystems of the whole. These are precisely the sorts of things that the Rancho LPG facility has managed to escape accountability for repeatedly, dating back to its initial construction in the 1970s. Random Lengths fully expects that Rancho LPG will be a major focus of our coverage in the year ahead, as the threat it poses to the community continues undiminished. The Rancho LPG story illuminated a broader pattern, in which most public bodies performed poorly this past year in protecting the public and the environment, with the notable exception of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. For example, on Feb. 1, the South Coast Air Quality Management District voted to adopt a “backstop rule” that would ensure that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach meet their stated air quality goals, which are a necessary part of the District’s Air Quality Management Plan, to meet its legal obligations under the Clean Air Act, including 2015 fine particulate standards. Both ports strenuously opposed the measure, even though it would have no impact whatsoever
The Local Publication You Actually Read
Two-thousand-thirteen was a year that saw some major landmarks in local and regional development, and environment issues, most of which are covered in “Finding Meaning In 2013 (p. 1). Locally, after almost a decade, a scaled-down version of the Ponte Vista Project has gotten planning commission approval. A developer and a concept have been approved for the redevelopment of Ports O’ Call. San Pedro has a new community plan for the first time in about a decade. A major new off-dock railyard project was approved—and promptly found itself in court. And, on Nov. 7, at her last Harbor Commission meeting as executive director, Geraldine Knatz secured approval for the 50-year AltaSea Marine Science Research Center lease. Regionally, on June 7, after decades of recurrent controversies, Southern California Edison abruptly announced it was shutting down the San Onofre nuclear power plant for good. But the most environmentally important story Random Lengths covered throughout the year concerned the Rancho LPG facility, an almost 40-year-old development. Nothing major has happened this year, despite a sharply rising tide of local concerns and official questioning, including calls for investigation and information from Rep. Henry Waxman and state Sen. Ted Lieu. Early in 2013, we reported that Rancho had once again broken faith with government officials trying to protect public health and welfare, breaking its October 2012 promise to provide the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council information about its insurance coverage. But on Feb. 4, 2013, the day before Rancho Palos Verdes was scheduled to discuss the matter again, Rancho representative Ron Conrow reneged. Rancho’s apparent lack of insurance coverage means that the public at large would bear the burden of everything lost in the case of a catastrophic disaster, which ought to be grounds for shutting the facility down. So far, however, Rancho’s evasive tactics have stymied efforts to hold them accountable. Throughout the year, Random Lengths reported on repeated examples of further failures and deception on Rancho’s part, as well as a string of three major disasters across the continent—an ammonium nitrate explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, on April 17, a crude oil train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec on July 6, and explosions at the Blue Rhino LPG plant in Tavares, northwest of Orlando, Fla. on July 29. After that, Waxman, sent an urgent letter to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, calling attention to serious inconsistencies between DHS and Environmental Protection Agency safety evaluations, and saying “the root cause of the problem may be deficiencies in the Chemical Facility AntiTerrorism Standards administered by DHS.” Almost simultaneously, Lieu, wrote to state Fire Marshal Chief Tonya Hoover, requesting “an investigation and risk analysis of the Rancho LPG facility,” citing a number of urgent public safety questions which local activists have long raised. Rancho LPG’s threat to public safety also emerged as an issue in the approval of a longdelayed, reduced-scale version of the Ponte Vista
the California State Senate, abandoned that bill at the last moment and moved a few key provisions into a bill specifically exempting the Sacramento King’s new stadium project from standard CEQA review. The bill passed both houses by wide margins in the last hours of the legislative year. Environmentalists had supported some streamlining proposals, which would have made it easier to do smart growth, density-enhancing infill development, but these were not included in Steinberg’s last-minute bill. Throughout the debate, planners and environmentalists pointed to California’s long record of economic growth under CEQA as clear evidence that the law does not constitute an economic burden as a cost of protecting the environment. In sharp contrast to the CEQA “reform” legislation, Random Lengths reported on the beneficial economic impacts of air quality regulations here in the South Coast air basin, as laid out in the Socioeconomic Report accompanying the AQMD’s 2012 Air Quality Management Plan, which the AQMD board approved in December 2012. Although the purpose of the plan is environmental—to bring the region into compliance with the Clean Air
7