Comment Log Display

The Environmental Justice Advisory Committee offers many good
suggestions for the Scoping Plan Update. 

Energy literacy is very important, especially since fossil fuels
are so cheap relative to people power. For example, power from our
muscles costs at least 200 times as much as the same power from a
gallon of gasoline, a ratio that depends on the minimum wage and
the price at the pump. 

Consumer education and empowerment is critical in making the
connection between banning fracking and cutting the fossil fuel fat
from the ‘American Dream.’ For example, what if all packaged
product labels had to inform us of the kinds of energy and
materials and GHGs required for both product and package and their
presence on the store shelf or delivered to our doorstep?

Another green job to include in those listed is – farming.
Polyculture and permaculture offer far more productivity in terms
of nutrition per acre than do current large-scale monocultures,
including monocultures which qualify for the “organic” label. And
do reconsider the usage of “organic” which now has two meanings –
both food grown with traditional amendments and plastic (synthetic
chemicals containing carbon double bonds). Clarity suggests
referring to the former as “biological.”

The quality of the EJAC’s comments suggests that this is the final
stage of updating the Scoping Plan, and that basic changes at this
stage probably can’t make it into the Plan. Nonetheless, as we
endeavor to make real our vision of the sustainable future, it
behooves us to continue refining that vision.

From a larger perspective, the scope of planning pursuant to AB32
and the context of California’s climate change regulations are
mostly about grafting alternative energy sources such as PVs,
windmills, and conservation onto the existing fossil-fuel
infrastructure and lifestyles.

Because fossil fuels are so cheap, people – especially in the U.S.
– have been able to construct lifestyles where needs and wants are
produced and provided in ways whereby vast amounts of unnecessary
energy are used. And many of the reasons for this excessive energy
use are structural, such as the distances between farms, offices,
schools and homes.

As an example of the problem I refer to transit, a topic seen
several times in the EJAC’s comments on the scoping plan update.
While high-occupancy transit is more energy efficient than
single-occupancy vehicles, buses and intercity rail use fossil
fuels and electric trains also use quite a bit of energy. Transit
also requires pavement, and every square foot of pavement is ground
that is not available to grow food and sequester carbon.

According an article about urban sprawl in The Economist (7/2/16),
planners recommend paving a third or more of the land in
residential development. If all this land were instead used to grow
food, many commutes could be walkable. Before fossil fuels became
widespread, people worked in workshops rather than factories and
offices, and most people worked next to where they lived. 

And when crafts and trades are practiced on a town or neighborhood
scale, the distances and weights now common for freight movement
may be expected to drop dramatically.

Moreover, there is good reason to think that fossil fuels will be
needed if we are to mine and refine more than a tiny fraction of
the various metals that are now used to manufacture electric cars,
batteries, smartphones, server farms, etc. Ozzie Zehner describes
these kinds of constraints in detail in his book, “Green
Illusions.” http://www.greenillusions.org/

So while we are planning near-term changes such as transitioning to
renewable sources as a much greater proportion of energy usage, we
should also be identifying the most adroit use of those renewables
so as to provide the most for our basic physical needs – clean air
and water, healthy food, comfy shelter, cooking, and plenty of
sleep and exercise.

I believe that the infrastructure which would be optimal for
meeting these needs is radically different from our current fossil
fuel infrastructure. And I am certain that basic, blank-slate
consideration of our eventual sustainable infrastructure is needed.
Rebuilding current infrastructure would require energy and
resources that would not later be available for building optimally
efficient, human-scale infrastructure.

And of course all energy and resources that are wasted with
rebuilding twice rather than once will not be available later for
supporting environmental justice. A key perspective for analyzing
various scenarios of rebuilding would be to use a long-term
sustainability discount rate:
http://www.rff.org/research/publications/how-should-benefits-and-costs-be-discounted-intergenerational-context-0

Displacement from one’s home due to gentrification or free-trade
globalization or palm oil plantations is of course the opposite of
environmental justice. Property rights must give precedence to
those indigenous people who have lived in a neighborhood or region
the longest. And “affordable housing” must mean owner-occupied as
well as rental. Protecting people’s relationships with their local
ecologies must surely also protect the health of the planetary
ecology.

A paper, originally written for a CalPERS-UC Davis symposium on
sustainable economics, which discusses some of this information in
more detail, is attached.