Our Work

A cause for our times: Repeal gravity now!

Our Jim Gerstenzang, with his writing partner at Safe Climate Campaign, Dan Becker, joined up on this satirical bit:

Memo to: Fellow Members of Congress

From: Darrell Issa, Republican of California

Re: Support for legislation to abolish an antiquated law.

I urge you to join us in sponsoring the Hall-Latta-Flake-Issa-Upton-Noem-Goodlatte Act.

For too long, science has been trotted out to justify environmental protection, when it is actually being used to mask tax-and-spend policies that sink our economy. With that in mind, I ask you to support the next logical step in our Republican Caucus' crusade to abolish job-killing "environmental" laws and excessive regulations. Please join us in cosponsoring H.R. 32174, a bill to repeal the Law of Gravity.

Kathy Price-Robinson looks into energy audits - good time of year for it

Our Kathy Price-Robinson, who is based in New Orleans, traveled recently to Montana to sit in on an energy-audit class, and wrote about the experience for the website GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. From her story:

When I arrive for the five-day energy-auditing course at the Pure Energy Center in eastern Montana, I see instructor A. Tamasin Sterner outside the main house, clapping her hands and doing a little dance.

If you know Tamasin, a veteran energy auditor who famously counseled President Obama on the need for weatherization programs, you expect this show of exuberance.

And even if you haven’t met her, you can imagine Tamasin’s exhilaration. After attending spiritual retreats on this 212-acre wooded ranch for more than 20 years, Tamasin recently bought the property, which has cabins and lodging for about 30 retreatants, from her spiritual teacher. Her goal: to further develop it into a retreat, event and training center. This is the first women-only auditing course at the site.

Janet Wilson looks at links between local environment and a family's illnesses

Our Janet Wilson has a deeply reported piece out through California Watch on the suspected links between persistent illnesses among members of one Maywood, California, family, and industries adjoining their neighborhood (in this separater piece Janet explains her reporting). From her story:

The Martin family lives 10 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, in a neat yellow house in a city called Maywood. 

Starting a few blocks from their home, nearly 2,000 factories churn out Southern California’s hot dogs, pesticides, patio furniture and other products. Trucks rumble off the I-710 freeway into sprawling freight rail yards. Odors of rotting animal carcasses waft through the family’s windows on hot summer nights.

The Martins also have endured years of illness. 

From the time Anaiz Martin was born until she was a toddler, her father would carry her in his arms, his big mustache tickling her baby cheeks. This simple embrace carried a haunting consequence. By age 3, Anaiz weighed just 19 pounds and could barely raise her head. Her parents said they were told by doctors that Salvador Martin’s mustache probably held sickening levels of lead from his plating factory job.

The heavy metal attacked her neurological system, permanently robbing her of critical learning skills.

Two decades later, her family's woes continue. Anaiz, now 21, her mother and siblings – Adilene, 22, and Sal Jr., 18 – have suffered irritable bowel syndrome, an ovarian cyst, skin rashes, chronic nausea, diarrhea, asthma and depression.

Their mother, Josefina, frets constantly about what she thinks are likely causes: the air they breathe, the ground beneath their home and, most of all, the gunky black, brown or yellow water that has intermittently run from their faucets for years.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Josefina, 45, said during an interview in the summer of 2010. “I try to keep myself up and going, but I am really upset all the time. I just want to know what’s going on with my family and all of this contamination.”

 

James Gerstenzang on cutting tailpipe emissions

Our James Gerstenzang writes in The New York Times Opinion section -- along with Safe Climate Campaign Director Dan Becker -- that President Obama must stick to his guns and order automakers to cut tailpipe emissions by 6 percent:

Automakers are pushing for the weakest standard and want the president to riddle it with loopholes. Americans want much better. A survey conducted in May for the Consumer Federation of America, for instance, found that 65 percent of Americans, including 62 percent of Republicans, supported a tough mileage standard — 60 m.p.g., which would come from installing technology that cuts carbon dioxide emissions 6 percent each year.

It is the biggest single step the president can take against global warming — and its benefits go beyond that. They would curb our appetite for oil, create jobs and start to check the flow of billions of dollars to OPEC and others.

Leslie Carlson and the role of lawyers in consumer protection

Our Leslie Carlson, a graphic artist/visual journalist, put together this detailed interactive graphic for Protect Consumer Justice, a nonprofit organization working to inform about, and defend, consumers' rights to seek redress through the courts for everything from product safety to medical malpractice. From the intro to the graphic:

Product safety. Medical negligence. Environmental oversight. Corporate wrongdoing. The civil justice system has had a dramatic effect on our day-to-day lives, allowing ordinary people a platform to tap constitutional rights enshrined by America’s founders and battle back to hold powerful corporations accountable. Consumer attorneys have helped increase the safety of products, improve our environment and ensure our health by fighting for people who often can’t fight for themselves. Their efforts have addressed dangers in the home and the workplace, on the road and in the sky — and by doing so have improved the quality of life for each of us.

James Gerstenzang on high energy costs

Our James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times Opinion section -- along with Safe Climate Campaign Director Dan Becker -- that one of the best ways to keep energy prices low in the long term is to enforce increased fuel efficiency in cars:

The Obama administration can't do much to lower the price of a gallon of gas, but it is on the cusp of a crucial decision that could help consumers come out ahead because they would need less gas.

Officials are quietly working on just how steeply to require the auto industry to cut emissions and increase mileage in the next generation of cars, SUVs and pickups. Their decision, coming as early as May, could require dramatically cleaner vehicles that would cut carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 6% a year and average 62 miles per gallon. The new rules would be phased in from 2017 to 2025.

Rosemary McClure on a surprise destination in the SoCal desert

Our Rosemary McClure, an inveterate travel writer, didn't stray far from her backyard for this look at springtime in the Southern California deserts for the Los Angeles Times. From her piece:

With spring around the corner — and parts of the monument bursting into color from verbena, lupine and other wildflowers and cactus — Mountains National Monument would seem to be a natural. If only more people knew about it.

"It's an ongoing issue," said monument manager Jim Foote of the Bureau of Land Management. "We're doing our best to alert people and let them know what kinds of treasures we have and how to get out and appreciate them."

I'd learned about the park while researching new places to hike. How had I overlooked a national monument? Especially one that's 60 miles long, 13 miles wide and only 100 miles from downtown L.A.

Scott Martelle on nuclear energy, and asking the right question

Our Scott Martelle had an op-ed piece heading into the weekend for the Sacramento Bee, spinning off the disasters in Japan and urging U.S. policy makers to question the wisdom of nuclear energy, given the potential for disaster. From his article:

Given the scope of what we don't know, and thus can't plan for, and the propensity for humans to screw up, it's hard to give weight to assurances that all is safe. And this is the problem with our local, regional and national reaction to the crisis in Japan. We should not be asking whether our reactors are safe. We should be asking, given the potential effects of a meltdown, whether we want to be playing this game of Russian roulette in the first place.

There is an argument to be made that the risk of environmental disaster from nuclear energy is preferable to the assured ecological degradation that comes from coal-fired plants. But that argument assumes an either/or scenario, that we can choose long-term environmental catastrophe from coal, or fire up the nuclear reactors.

We know those are not the only options.

Most of California is blessed with an enviable climate that promises intense, harnessable sunshine nearly every day of the year. There is no environmental risk to capturing solar energy, and it is indefensible that the state does not require all new buildings to include solar panels on the roofs. The state already is making strides toward tapping wind power, though more could be done.

Our James Gerstenzang in defense of the Clean Air Act

Journalism Shop member James Gerstenzang and Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, write in a Miami Herald article that hidden in a House-approved budget bill is a provision that may seriously damage the Clean Air Act:

Some of the nation's biggest polluters have teamed up with the Republicans to try to stop progress – just as more evidence documents global warming: The 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1998; last year was tied with 2005 as the hottest.

Together, they would turn the House into a special-interest court of appeals to circumvent the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that orders EPA to fight global warming. They would limit the clean air law's provisions protecting us from power plant pollution and block several states from adopting tougher pollution controls than the federal government. …

Now, automakers are demanding that politicians – not scientists – write the clean car standards intended to reduce carbon-dioxide pollution.

Robyn Norwood on the sublime beauty of snowshoeing

Our Robyn Norwood has this nice travel piece for SignonSanDiego on snowshoeing at Mammoth Lakes, in the Sierra Nevada. From her story:

The moon, two nights shy of full, rose overhead. The snow beneath our feet was packed firm. But the woods were not silent that night, filled instead with the crunching of our snowshoes and the occasional low growl of a tractor grooming a ski run, its lonely light creeping along a distant hill.

The voices of my 20 companions — 18 other snowshoers and our two leaders — were a comfort in the woods, along with repeated assurances that bears were in hibernation.

[...]

We paused to regroup and catch our breath, and an astronomer who happened to be in our midst told us about the formation of the moon, then pointed out Jupiter, and later the bright star Sirius. A shooting star streaked across the sky, the sort of did-I-just-see-that moment you might dismiss as your imagination if you were alone. But we saw it, a blink-of-an-eye confirmed by the quick gasps of others.