In 1999, Berkeley launched a pilot project that took food waste from the city’s restaurants and grocery stores and sent it to a composting operation. By 2007, all Berkeley residents were given the opportunity to compost their moldy produce, bones, and greasy napkins by tossing them in the green rollaway carts the city provides for yard debris collection. The food waste composting program
proved wildly popular from the start; the city received thousands more requests for five-gallon kitchen green bins than it had anticipated. By 2009, the city was diverting over 12,000 tons of food and yard debris from residences and nearly 6,000 tons of commercial food scraps per year to Grover
Environmental Products, a composting facility located in Vernalis, near Modesto.

Berkeley’s gardeners have been especially pleased with the program, as the food and green waste is transformed into rich—and free—compost for schools, community gardens, and residents. Once a month for most of the year, a huge heap is given away at the marina, where residents fill their trunks
and truck beds with boxes and bags of WonderGrow, Grover’s black gold.

Yet as popular as the program is, the large-scale composting of city food and yard waste faces growing challenges, some related to the materials that city dwellers toss in their bins, others to the evolving competition for food scraps. Good ideas—like enriching the soil of organic farms with compost made from urban food waste—are not necessarily meshing with other good ideas, like using
compostable plant-based plastics rather than disposable petroleum-based plastics. Pesticides approved for use on lawns are persisting all the way through the industrial composting process and contaminating the end product, making it unsuitable for organic agriculture. And the development of alternative composting technologies—namely biogas digesters—is provoking a debate over what food and yard waste should be used for.

Broken wheel
Americans like take-out food, and environmentally conscious consumers and businesses increasingly offer “compostable bioplastic” containers—clamshells, cups, and utensils made from renewable raw plant materials like potato or cornstarch. But some of these products offer more hope than reality. For a bioplastic product to be considered “compostable” by the American Society for Testing & Materials, it has to meet three criteria: It must break down into carbon dioxide, water, and biomass at the same rate as paper; it must disintegrate into small pieces that are indistinguishable from surrounding compost; and it must not produce toxic residue that would prevent the compost from supporting plant life.

While compostable bioplastics will break down in a backyard compost pile, it takes a very long time—longer than makes sense for most backyard composters. Most purveyors of compostable bioplastics recommend that their products go to commercial composting facilities, where the piles reach higher sustained temperatures.

In October 2009, a contingent of Ecology Center staffers toured the Grover composting yard, where Berkeley’s municipal food and yard waste is carefully cooked and turned in long piles called windrows. The staffers were curious about the fate of the SpudWare sporks and Natureworks cups that are optimistically tossed into green carts throughout the city. At Grover, they observed employees picking all plastic items—both petroleum– and plant-based—out of the dumped materials. Any smaller plastics that made it through the initial screening were removed later, as the material was sent through a trommel and a sorting station.

Here’s the reason: even if bioplastic items are suited to break down in a commercial facility, they look nearly identical to the petroleum-based plastic they are meant to replace, which makes it difficult for workers at the plant to distinguish between the two. Because of the quantity of waste they are sorting, and the difficulty of identifying the types of plastics that arrive at the facility, laborers remove all plastics, including most compostable bioplastics, which are then hauled off to the landfill along with the other contaminants. (The exceptions to the identification problem are Biobags, the green trash bags made of non-GMO plant starches that many people use to line kitchen compost bins. No petroleum-based trash bag is bright green, so BioBags are easy to spot.)

However, the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) has not approved bioplastics to be used in organic compost, so even the readily identifiable BioBags are not used in WonderGrow, Grover’s compost that is approved for organic farming. “The wheel is broken,” says manager Adam Grover. “A lot of the people who buy organic food are the same ones pushing bioplastics, but organic farmers can’t buy compost made of bioplastics.”

Pesky pesticides
Grover Environmental Products provides both a waste hauling service for cities and a high-quality soil product for farmers and landscapers. This double-focus comes naturally; the company’s composting facility grew out of a landscaping business that Adam Grover’s father started in 1970. Over time, the family business branched out to include a tree service, a nursery, and the composting operation. Because the Grovers have been involved in a panoply of horticultural activities, they know the value of great compost. “We use the waste stream to get to that finished product,” says Adam Grover, “but we go to great lengths to consistently make a quality finished product.”

According to Brian Mathews, food scrap program manager for the Alameda County Waste Management Authority (StopWaste.org), Grover’s focus on the quality of the end product is unparalleled. “Grover is considered by the industry to be one of the top producers of organic compost. He’s not associated with any garbage company; he’s totally independent and makes a high quality product that is excellent for agriculture. He cares about his product he’s making. He’s concerned about the feedstock. He is making a product that he can sell to repeat customers who are growing vegetables and everything else,” says Mathews. That is high praise indeed, considering that Mathews is a former competitor; before joining StopWaste.org, Mathews ran the Gilton Resource Recovery Composting Facility, which had the City of Berkeley’s composting contract until it was awarded to Grover.

Unfortunately, even the most diligent composting operations can’t entirely control what substances make it into their scrap heap. Farmers constitute a significant part of Grover’s client base, which is why it was such a blow when the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced last fall that Grover’s WonderGrow compost was prohibited for use in organic farming because the department found it contained bifenthrin residues. Bifenthrin is a pyrethroid insecticide used in products like Talstar, Capture, Brigade, and Ortho Home Defense Max to kill ants, spiders, roaches, termites, and bees. Bifenthrin is also found in Scotts LawnPro Step 3, a popular lawn fertilizer that kills all the bugs in your grass.

Bifenthrin persists in soil for quite some time, so when your neighbor treats his turf with Scotts LawnPro Step 3, then cuts his grass and dumps it into his green curbside cart, the compost made with that municipal yard waste will most likely contain residual bifenthrin. “Every composter who
uses yard waste in America has this problem,” Grover sighs. “It’s a huge problem.” The CDFA also banned Clean City Compost made by Feather River Organics and Nortech Gold Compost made by Nortech Waste LLC, two other brands of compost that use yard waste.

It could not have happened at a worse time. The CDFA alerted organic growers to the bifenthrin problem right before fall, when most farmers apply compost to their fields. Grover had just delivered fifteen truckloads of compost to Yolo County’s Full Belly Farm, which sells organic produce at Bay Area farmers’ markets and through a popular CSA. “We ended up hauling those fifteen truckloads back off Full Belly Farm,” Grover recalls. “The farmers were very disappointed.”

Paul Muller, one of the Full Belly partners, explains that after that incident they were reticent to buy compost from other operations, fearful that other products would be contaminated, too. “We did buy some other compost and frankly, it wasn’t the same quality,” Muller says. “We have had to rethink our strategy. We have relied on compost a lot for fertility.” As an alternative, Full Belly planted cover
crops like vetch that can be tilled back into the soil. In Muller’s opinion, “There are a lot of persistent pollutants out there that should be taken out of home garden use because it ends up in the compost.”

But for composters, city yard waste provides an otherwise ideal product that they can turn into cheap compost. “Organic farms aren’t exactly rich,” Grover explains. “That’s the beauty of using green waste from cities—it makes compost affordable to small-scale organic farmers.”

The bifenthrin contamination was discovered under unusual circumstances that illustrate some holes in the regulatory framework for organic compost. In this case, the pesticide was discovered when a wheatgrass farmer in Placerville had his product tested by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. “The wheatgrass farmer figured out that wheatgrass grew really well in straight compost. The wheatgrass was shipped to the grocery store in a tray full of soil,” says Grover. Because it was sold in that manner, he says, the testers threw both the wheatgrass and some of the attached soil in a blender for testing in the lab. “When they tested just the wheatgrass, it was free of bifenthrin,” says
Grover. “But when it was mixed with the compost, it was not.” This is significant because most wheatgrass customers only eat the plant itself, which is typically sheared from the growing tray. In the case of bifenthrin, the pyrethroid can attach itself to soil but does not get taken up into the plant.

Clear rules govern the testing of organic produce: the EPA sets acceptable levels of synthetic pesticides, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation conducts random testing of organic produce to make sure the guidelines are being followed. Yet according to Renee Mann, review program manager of the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI), “There is no clear authority that
tells us how to test compost.” OMRI is the Oregon-based nonprofit that determines which agricultural inputs are allowed for use in organic production and processing. The National Organic Program of the USDA sets the standards for what is allowable, and OMRI carefully reviews products against those standards for inclusion on its list of approved products, on which organic growers rely.

The National Organic Program has neither set acceptable levels for bifenthrin in compost nor has it determined how and when to test for bifenthrin. The only composts that were prohibited by the CDFA last fall were the ones associated with the testing of the Placerville wheatgrass, even though many other composts that use yard waste as a feedstock could be contaminated with bifenthrin as well.

The National Organic Program has neither set acceptable levels for bifenthrin in compost nor has it determined how and when to test for bifenthrin. The only composts that were prohibited by the CDFA last fall were the ones associated with the testing of the Placerville wheatgrass, even though many other composts that use yard waste as a feedstock could be contaminated with bifenthrin as well.

Composters who use yard waste in their mixes are eager to get their composts out of regulatory limbo. The CDFA continues to prohibit WonderGrow for organic growing, while at the same time, WonderGrow continues to be listed in OMRI’s directory of approved products. The NOP, which has the last word, remains silent. According to Adam Grover, “at the EcoFarm Conference in January, Miles McEvoy of the National Organic Program promised to see if he could institute a timeout period during which more testing could be done on finished crops rather than on the compost and inputs.” Recently, OMRI posted a notice on its Web site: “Most yard waste composts will remain on the OMRI Products List until a full investigation is completed for each compost. This is based upon OMRI’s due process, which allows our clients to be informed of an investigation, provide further information to defend their product listing, and contest OMRI’s final decision.”

The NOP is aware of the problem, says Mann, but it may be many months before guidelines are issued regarding bifenthrin in compost. “It’s a pretty big issue,” says Mann. “The levels that they ultimately set may lead to us delisting some or all of the yard waste compost on our list.”

Power politics
Composting is an up-and-coming industry, likely to follow on the heels of recycling as an environmentally and economically preferable municipal waste option. Just as corporate waste haulers expanded into the recycling business, they are now expanding to composting operations. This January, Texas-based garbage giant Waste Management, Inc. announced that it will “expand organics recycling facilities across the US and Canada” by investing in Harvest Power, the largest food and yard waste composting facility in North America.

Waste Management intends to pursue both aerobic and anaerobic digestion technologies, two very different methods that use municipal food waste for different ends: fertilizer or fuel. Grover practices aerobic composting, which means that bacteria, in the presence of oxygen, rapidly consume the plant matter. The waste products of the process are carbon dioxide, heat, water, and humus, the soil amendment that growers covet. Carbon dioxide builds up in the bottom of the windrows as the piles heat up. If there is too much of it, the piles will start to decompose anaerobically and generate methane, a greenhouse gas that the EPA deems 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. To avoid that, Grover carefully checks the carbon dioxide levels within the compost piles and turns them with a giant rolling machine to re-inject oxygen into the long brown heaps of organic matter.

On the other hand, the methane produced by anaerobic digestion can be diverted to a combined heat and power unit and transformed into electricity. The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) is using food waste from the City of San Francisco for that very purpose. San Francisco’s waste management utility, Recology, sells nearly 25 percent of its commercial food scraps to EBMUD for biogas (methane) generation. The food scraps are combined with sewage, wastewater, and bacteria in EBMUD’s two-million-gallon bio-digesters. The heat and methane produced from the anaerobic digestion is transformed into electricity that meets ninety percent of the power plant’s operational energy needs. Some days, EBMUD even sells back surplus electricity to PG&E.

After the noxious stew has served its methane generation purpose, EBMUD spins the excess water out of the waste material. Solid wastes are carted off to be used as alternative daily cover—the mulch that is spread over the garbage at the landfill to reduce blowing litter, animal attraction, and noxious odors. At this point, the biosolids from EBMUD’s digester cannot be used as an agricultural soil amendment because of prohibitions regarding the use of sewage sludge.

Not all anaerobic digesters are the same. The technology is changing at a fast clip, mostly driven by European companies. Some digesters, like EBMUD’s, add food scraps to sewage to up the methane production. Others use animal manure and other agricultural wastes as the methane-producing feedstock. Still other digesters, which use less water, can employ food and yard waste to produce methane. This last version can both produce energy from methane yet emerge with an end product that can be used as a soil amendment.

In the last fifteen years, the development of anaerobic digesters in Europe has exploded, spurred by the European Union Landfill Directive of 1999 that required member states to stabilize organic material prior to land-filling. If the US were to follow suit, in the pursuit of minimizing methane from landfills and maximizing energy production from renewable resources, anaerobic digesters could indeed be the next big thing. Waste Management is betting on it.

In fact, as more anaerobic facilities are developed, debates are breaking out over which processing method constitutes the “best and highest use” of municipal food scraps. Adam Grover is not concerned that the biogas generators will claim too much of the spoils; he thinks there will be plenty to go around. In fact, he says, it is possible for aerobic compost operations to have too much food waste, since the process relies on a careful ratio. “You can hardly compost food waste by itself—it’s too rich. You need to mix it with green waste, so we might get more food waste than what we can compost soundly. You might get too high of nitrogen count and have odor problems. But,” he concedes, “I don’t know how it’s all going to pan out. [Anaerobic digestion] could be competitive in time, but the technology is not there yet. Maybe in ten years.”

At present, Tania Levy, associate management analyst from the City of Berkeley’s Solid Waste Management also sees no competition between the two methods. “They’re not competition, they augment one another!” she says. “We don’t have enough permitted composting facilities to handle all the organic materials, so adding more facilities of either kind is a good thing.”

Meanwhile, the amount of waste material being diverted from the landfill and trucked to the compost yard continues to rise. Since the Berkeley residential food scrap program debuted three years ago, Levy says that the amount of residential food scraps and yard waste captured has increased 39 percent, while the amount of commercial food scraps has increased 24 percent. Composting is a burgeoning industry, and challenges are an unavoidable aspect of that growth. But the vexations of persistent pesticides and indistinguishable bioplastics may be small bumps on the way to urban food and yard waste becoming a valuable commodity.

Your career has been distinguished by your affiliation with a particular tool: the sediment corer. Tell me about it.
The main method that I use is looking at various components of sediment that is in lakes, bogs, marshes, or the bottom of the ocean, and I use a sediment corer to get them out. The sediment at the bottom of a lake accumulates with time, so the farther you go down into that sediment column, the further back in time you are going. You can get into that sediment and get snapshots of time going back thousands of years.

What is the advantage of sampling sediment from the bottom of a body of water?
At the bottom of a lake, there is very little oxygen, so anything that makes it down there is going to be preserved because of this anoxic condition—there’s no microbial breakdown or oxidization happening. You can compare one level of sediment to the next, look at frequency changes, and talk about real changes.

You work for the USGS, but you also contract yourself out to clients who want you to get core samples for their research.
There are a ton of scientists out there that work on cores that other people have taken, but they don’t have the ability or wherewithal to get these sediment cores themselves. I have this mechanical side of my brain, where I like working with my hands, so I have designed, built, and refined all these coring devices to push them in different directions. And that has led to a lot of cool trips to various places, like a frozen lake in Banff, Canada or my recent trip to Palmyra, an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve been getting into these deep lakes with this hand-operated equipment. I am being contracted out basically for the labor of getting the core. But generally, people who are interested in getting the core have one objective. [For example,] they may be interested in looking at charcoal to reconstruct fire history. And I can have the rest of the sediment to look at geochemistry, stable isotopes, pollen, and pursue my own research interests.

Are clients asking you to look into climate change?
Not necessarily. I did my dissertation and lots of research down in Guatemala, and there was definitely a climate component, but I was also looking at human impacts on the environment. There are so many things you can look at when you are looking at lakes. Lakes are a depositional basin—the trash can of the environment. Everything that happens in a watershed will show up in the sediment of a lake. It washes down and eventually gets preserved. I can look at erosion, deforestation, the human burning of vegetation. I can look at prehistoric Native American activity. For this island core [from Palmyra], the funding is coming from National Geographic,
and the questions [the client] is asking is when the coconut palm arrived on this island, and did the Polynesians bring it as part of their big oceanic voyages, or did the seed arrive here on its own?

The client knows that I am interested in paleoclimatology studies, so she’s going to need one cubic centimeter of sediment from forty samples that size. But there are hundreds and hundreds of cubic centimeters of sediment left for me to dive into and look at precipitation records, sea surface temperature records, El Nino… I can get all this data out of that from this killer spot right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In your USGS work, is there a push to study climate change?
Right now, there is a big push toward climate, so I found myself situated nicely coming out of school with this degree in paleoclimatology. Even if you look at the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, we have only been taking temperature and precipitation records for a maximum of 150 to 200 years in some places. The statistically reliable data shows this trend toward warming. But we have to know what the baseline is. And that’s what I do.

We’ve gotten the modern instrumental record, but we need to know, over the last 10,000 years, what has climate, precipitation, what has temperature done on its own so that we can really talk about what we are doing to the planet. USGS is interested in that for predictive reasons.

Climate studies can be broken into three components: the paleo studies (which is what I do), the modern monitoring, and the modeling. Basically, you take the modern data and tie it in with the paleo data that goes back thousands of years, and that is what makes a robust model. You can’t model what the future is going to do just using the instrumental data. You have to understand the baseline data in order to judge whether the data from modern monitoring is within the range of natural climate fluctuation. Data from the sediment cores provides the backdrop against which you can judge the changes that have occurred in the recent past.

What are the other tools that scientists use to get climate data from the paleo records?
People take cores out of ice sheets, like the ice drilling that has happened in Greenland and Antarctica. They are very valuable. They go back hundreds of thousands of years. In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, his giant graph showing the CO2 curve is based on ice core data. Ice cores are based on the same principle—it is a depositional environment that grows with time, so the farther you go down into the core, the farther back in time you are going.

People also look at tree rings. All of the various methods have strengths and weakness. Ice has little bubbles of air trapped in it that are snapshots of what the air was like at that time. They go in and extract that air and quantify the CO2 in it. You don’t get that in the sediment, but the beauty of the sediment is that there is no oxygen, so you get nicely preserved microfossil samples. All these approaches have a suite of analyses that they are ideal for. The ideal is to pull them all together and to synthesize these big records.

How do you actually get the core sample?
I use a gravity corer. I drop it, and it will stick into the mud. It is weighted and has an empty barrel at the bottom. However much weight I have attached to it will dictate how deep it will sink into the mud. I can adjust that back and forth to maximize the mud I’m getting. You can typically go a meter and a half or two meters into the mud.

In Banff, with a hand-operated design, working on ice, I was able to put the corer on a raft, which no one else has done before, and get this thing dialed in. The lagoon in the middle of the Palmyra atoll was fifty meters deep. I have a tripod on my raft, and there is a weight on a guide tube that you lower it in and let it do the gravity thing. I have a rope attached to that weight that goes up into a pulley on my tripod, and I pull it up five feet, then drop it. Then pull it up again. Basically, it’s a percussion. It goes in about a centimeter each time.

Doesn’t it muck up all the layers?
Amazingly, it doesn’t. There’s the sediment-water interface, which is a little bit sloshy, but once you get below that, the best description of most sediment is that it is the consistency of toothpaste.

What’s your favorite thing to look at once you’ve got your core sample back to the lab?
Pollen. That’s my main thing. It’s just amazing. It’s beautiful. It’s everywhere. There are probably 100,000 pollen grains that fell on us today. It’s a complete representation for the plants that are growing anywhere. It’s got a very cool morphology, and I like the process of it. You can count charcoal fragments. You go centimeter by centimeter through a core and get a complete fire history of an area. You can tie that in with the vegetation and look at fuel loads versus fires and how all these dynamics work together.

What has been one of your more surprising finds?
Apart from the dead body I found in the lake in Mexico? I have worked on a number of cores from Guatemala, where I did my dissertation, and the collapse of the Mayan civilization shows up visually in the view of the core. There was such a dramatic shift in the environment when the area was depopulated around a thousand years ago. I look at pollen and all this other stuff and that tells me when exactly that happened. But when I go back and look at the core itself, I see the line that goes from a clay-rich carbonate mud to almost pure organic mud above it, indicating that transition. And it happened on a dime. What caused the collapse of the Mayan civilization is the million-dollar question. I think it was a combination of environmental degradation and climate shift. There was an incredibly long history of deforestation and erosion, and then the climate shifted right when they were really overextended. It’s becoming clear that it was a double whammy.

What’s your personal take on climate change?
It’s a moral issue. I’ve puzzled over our role in climate change. There’s a lot of fear-mongering around climate change. Some populations are going to be severely affected, others are going to be just fine. Some species will go extinct, others won’t. That’s basically the way the earth has been moving along for four billion years. So what it boils down to is, do we have a moral obligation to not push all these other species to the brink? Because we have consciousness and an awareness of what we are doing; because we have the ability to make a decision; therefore we have the responsibility.

But then something happened: global warming took center stage as the environmental issue of our time. The need to transition away from burning fossil fuels became paramount, and some environmentalists began to reconsider nuclear power as a necessary and even preferable part of the energy portfolio. Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog, Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation, is one of those people. “The situation is so much more dire with climate than almost anybody except the professional climatologists know,” says Brand. “With nuclear people, the more they know, the less worried they are. With climate people, the more they know, the more worried they are. It’s that combination that makes nuclear exceptionally green right now.”

Plenty of environmentalists disagree with Brand’s assessment, though they do admit that the landscape is shifting. Climate, the power grid, nuclear generator design, financial incentives, and public resistance are all in flux. Has enough changed to justify an enormous public investment in nuclear power? Will nuclear power help meet the goals of California’s AB 32, which mandates statewide greenhouse gas reductions by 2020?

The low– or no-carbon emission energy resources in California’s current portfolio include most of the renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric) and nuclear. According to the California Energy Commission, twelve percent of the state’s overall electricity supply is derived from nuclear generators, primarily from Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) south of San Clemente. By some estimates, nearly a quarter of California’s low-carbon electricity supply comes from nuclear plants. The Energy Commission found that a complete life-cycle analysis of nuclear power reveals that its greenhouse gas emissions are comparable to wind, solar voltaics, and geothermal technologies.

Every year, the Energy Commission compiles a comprehensive assessment of California’s nuclear power plants. In 2008’s draft report, the Commission determined that if one of the state’s two nuclear plants were to go off-line for a year, greenhouse gas emissions from power generation would increase by seven to eight percent. Replacement power would most likely come from natural gas-fired plants, with a resulting extra 7 million tons of CO2 churned into the atmosphere.

Baseload Blues

Nuclear energy has a valuable characteristic that many of the renewables presently don’t: it provides baseload electricity, or the minimum needed to meet normal customer demand. The sun might not shine, the wind might not blow, drought might strike a dam’s drainage basin, but nuclear fission can keep the electrons moving along the power grid. Baseload plants run continually, shutting down only occasionally for repairs or maintenance. “The baseload situation drives everything—you’ve got to be able to have juice that is on all the time,” says Brand, who argues that nuclear should be viewed as a low carbon emission replacement for coal, not a replacement for renewables.

The fact that most renewables cannot supply baseload today does not mean that they won’t in the near future, if energy storage technologies improve and their power network can be expanded. For instance, a 2007 Stanford study determined that wind could provide reliable baseload energy if multiple wind farms were connected with transmission lines, thus combining their separate outputs. “If interconnected wind is used on a large scale, a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power, and the remaining intermittent portion can be used for transportation, allowing wind to solve energy, climate, and air pollution problems simultaneously,” says Cristina Archer, the study’s lead author and a consulting assistant professor in Stanford’s department of civil and environmental engineering.

Nuclear Waste: Curse or Opportunity?

The radioactive spent fuel left over from generating nuclear power is one of its greatest liabilities, but some argue that radioactive waste—because it is contained—is better than the byproducts of burning coal. According to the Sierra Club, coal is responsible for 59 percent of the sulfur dioxide pollution, fifty percent of the particle pollution, over forty percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, and most of the mercury pollution in the US every year. In 1993, nuclear physicist Alex Gabbard of Oak Ridge National Laboratory wrote in a seminal article, “Overall, nuclear power produces far less waste material than fossil-fuel based power plants. Coal-burning plants are particularly noted for producing large amounts of toxic and mildly radioactive ash due to concentrating naturally occurring metals and radioactive material from the coal. Contrary to popular belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants.”

Admittedly, comparing anything to coal sets a pretty low bar. Moreover, nuclear waste remains semi-homeless. In 1976, California prohibited the construction of new nuclear power plants until there is a method of permanently disposing of the waste. Six years later, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act made the federal government responsible for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The US Department of Energy (DOE) was supposed to start taking possession of the spent fuel by 1998, but that never happened, because its underground permanent repository at Yucca Mountain has been mired in lawsuits and controversy. At this point, 2020 is its most optimistic opening date. By then, operating commercial reactors will have created more spent fuel than can be stored at Yucca Mountain, so new repositories will be needed.

In the meantime, California’s nuclear wastes are being stored at reactor sites. Plant owners Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison are being forced to construct more dry cask storage facilities onsite and to double up on the number of spent rods in their storage pools. The more densely that spent fuel assemblies are packed, the higher the risk of radiation release from earthquakes or terrorist acts.

Brand notes that other countries do not think about nuclear waste in the same way that the US does. Canada, he says, “treat[s] the storage not as a ten-thousand-year problem but as a hundred-year problem,” by building interim facilities meant to store the waste for seven generations, after which future Canadians can decide if it should be recycled or permanently discarded. Another way we could approach waste, Brand suggests, is to sell it to the Russians, who are willing to permanently store it for the US.

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce?

The US nuclear power industry gets much of its fuel from Russia’s decommissioned nuclear weapons. “Unlike any other weapons system which turns into scrap when you get rid of it, when you dismantle a nuclear weapon, it’s quite valuable,” says Brand. “It’s one very intelligent use of a lot of the uranium that has already been mined and engineered into these horrible weapons. You get a double win on that one—you get rid of the damn weapons and get free high quality energy out of them with no carbon dioxide coming out of the process.”

The Megatons to Megawatts program is a government-to-government agreement between the US and Russia launched in 1993. According to the United States Enrichment Corporation, which administers the program, as of September, 345 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium has been recycled into 10,010 metric tons of low enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, equivalent to 13,795 nuclear warheads eliminated. Virtually the entire US fleet of nuclear reactors has used fuel from this program.

The concept of recycling warms environmentalists’ hearts, so it is no surprise that the term is being used in conjunction with nuclear power, instead of “reprocessing.” Weapons are often spoken of as being “recycled” into civilian fuel for power. Spent nuclear fuel is said to be “recycled,” meaning that portions that can be reused for fuel are reclaimed. But many of the positive connotations of “recycling” don’t really apply to nuclear fuel.

The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has been either prohibited or unfunded in the US since the ‘70s, because the process is notoriously vulnerable to nuclear proliferation. Spent nuclear fuel that has not been reprocessed is heavy, bulky, and extremely radioactive; a terrorist or rogue state would be hard-pressed to acquire and transport it for the purpose of making weapons out of it. When spent fuel is reprocessed, however, the desired components become easier to obtain and handle. Separated plutonium becomes a concentrated powder; only twenty pounds can make a bomb. Studies by the National Academies, the National Commission on Energy Policy, the Harvard University Project on Managing the Atom, and the MIT Interdisciplinary Study have all concluded that reprocessing is unnecessary, uneconomic, and counter to nonproliferation goals. In its latest assessment, the California Energy Commission agrees.

Reprocessing costs more than storing used fuel. France reprocesses most of the world’s spent fuel. Yet a French government study in 2000 found that reprocessing spent fuel at La Hague cost approximately twice what storage would have. Moreover, reprocessing doesn’t reduce the amount of waste, although it does reduce the length of time that the waste remains dangerously radioactive, and the volume of the intensely radioactive waste is smaller. Still, a large quantity of intermediate-level waste is created, and deep repositories like Yucca Mountain are still necessary. And reprocessing is negative in that in a conventional reprocessing plant, radioactive emissions are released into the atmosphere during routine operations. Spent fuel storage has a much better safety record than reprocessing plants.

In 2006, President Bush created the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a federal R&D program meant to address nuclear energy’s Achilles’ heel. Brand calls GNEP “one of the only things President Bush did right.” One of the key objectives of GNEP is to recycle nuclear fuel using new technologies that are proliferation-resistant and can recover more energy and reduce waste. A variety of new reprocessing techniques have shown promise in the lab, but they have not yet been scaled up. The Department of Energy estimates these technologies could be available in ten to twenty years, but the Nuclear Energy Institute estimates fifty. The GNEP goals are ambitious and the costs exorbitant, but some have faith that flaws can be engineered out of the reprocessing system.

Soon, the US will be in the business of recovering plutonium from our own surplus weapons. However, controversy is already swirling around the reprocessing facility planned near Aiken, South Carolina after Daniel Tedder, an independent expert hired to review the contractor’s plans, found them shockingly inadequate and filled with safety problems. He has publicly complained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has harrassed him about his reports and pressured him to “water them down.”

The Government Gravy Train

Nuclear power plants (and reprocessing plants) are costly to build, and they depend on government subsidies and loan guarantees to be competitive. Large reactors can cost $2.5 billion to $4 billion each; it takes decades to recoup the investment. As part of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress granted approximately $10 billion in new subsidies to the nuclear industry.

Many environmentalists fear that public investment in nuclear will gobble up dollars that could be invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The National Resources Defense Council warns that the cost of nuclear power is prohibitive and makes it uncompetitive on the free market. NRDC’s position paper states “a national cap on carbon emissions would certainly help reduce nuclear’s significant current cost differential with large coal– and gas-fired power plants, but it will not ensure that nuclear stays competitive with these smaller, cheaper, cleaner, faster, and more flexible distributed sources of electric power generation.” Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has argued that, “every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen climate change by buying less solution per dollar.”

They may have reason to worry: According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in its 2008 R&D budget proposal, the DOE requested funding increases of ten percent or more for hydrogen and nuclear technologies while requesting funding decreases for all other renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.

Stumbling Blocks

Even if the nuclear industry got the green light to start building a fleet of new plants across the country, obstacles stand in the way. Global warming has created unpredictable precipitation patterns and drought. Current nuclear plants rely on billions of gallons of water for cooling; it’s why they are built alongside rivers, lakes, and oceans. According to the Associated Press, 24 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors are located in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. Plants sited on inland bodies of water may face complications related to dropping water levels. Alternately, even small rises in sea level will impact nuclear facilities that use ocean water. Future generations of nuclear power generators may rely on other means of cooling, but many of those technologies are not yet field-tested.

It also takes over a decade to plan, license and build a nuclear plant. Worse, there’s a bottleneck in the supply chain: only one factory in the world, Japan Steel Works, is able to manufacture the central part of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single piece. The handful of other manufacturers worldwide able to make large forgings are gearing up to produce parts for the nuclear industry, but even then, capacity will be three or four pressure vessels a year. Other manufacturers are researching alternative methods to make the components as well as reactor designs that don’t require single-piece vessels.

Power Grid Paradigms

Many environmentalists are content to let nuclear power fade into history because they believe that the current paradigm of the energy grid, featuring large, centralized power plants, is outdated. The evolving model involves decentralized generation, often called “the Internet for energy.” Just as in a few decades, computers went from room-filling behemoths to millions of personal electronic devices capable of communicating with millions of others, likewise, large power plants will give way to millions of small power producers that are located where the power is used. Many power consumers will also become power generators, feeding power back into the grid.

Both private and public money is chasing this vision. Recently, North Carolina State University was awarded a $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a “smart” grid that can “store and distribute alternative energy from solar panels, wind farms, and more,” allowing individual citizens to harvest their own energy and sell it back to power companies. This September, Google and General Electric announced a partnership to promote greater use of renewable energy in the US and cooperate on technology projects. According to the Financial Times, the companies’ first priority is to lobby Washington to promote an expansion of the US electricity transmission grid to reach more renewable energy sources, and to lobby for the creation of a smart grid.

A smart grid could assess energy prices in real time using “smart meters,” which would be installed in homes and businesses. Energy consumers could adjust their power devices to take advantage of best prices. This would mean a more efficient power grid and a diminished need for polluting peaker plants. In some cases, the expansion of the transmission grid would aid efficiency by shortening the distance energy must travel to the end user.

PG&E has been moving in this direction; the company’s goal is to install 10.3 million digital electric and gas meters with data communication functions for all customers by 2012. The company has already hooked up 25,000 solar-generating customers to the electric grid, and these customers can choose to sell all or some of the electricity their solar panels generate to PG&E.

New Small Nukes

Stewart Brand insists that a decentralized model does not preclude nuclear power generation. Indeed, a race is on worldwide to produce a new generation of small nuclear reactors that can live on a barge or sit in a hole in the ground for decades. “These are not the reactors that my generation went out and fulminated against,” Brand says. “These are better in all the respects that we worried about.” In an effort to wake up the hibernating US nuclear energy industry, the DOE is soliciting bids for new nuclear reactor designs. The winner gets $100 million over 5 years while seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Construction of the winning design could begin by 2015.

According to Phil McKenna in The New Scientist, over sixty designs are under development around the world. Among the contenders: Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is designing the “Small Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor,” or SSTAR, a 20-megawatt power generator that ships fully assembled with a thirty-year fuel supply sealed in a tamper-proof cask. Instead of using water for cooling, the SSTAR is surrounded by a meter of lead that carries heat away from the core. Toshiba of Japan is working on the “Super Safe, Small and Simple,” or 4S, a unit the company is intending to install in Galena, Alaska to supply the remote town with a steady ten megawatts for thirty years. The whole unit then would be shipped to a reprocessing facility. None of these nascent designs are perfect: some engineering solutions lead to new design vulnerabilities. For coolant, the 4S uses liquid sodium metal, which reacts violently with water. Contact with moisture in the air could cause it to burst into flames.

The End of the (Power) Line

The operating licenses of California’s nuclear plants expire in fourteen to seventeen years; if extensions are granted, they will operate another twenty years before arriving at the end of their lifespans. New nuclear plants will not take their place so long as the law remains the same, and the federal nuclear waste repository remains unready. Barbara Byron of the CA Energy Commission says, “The only means for changing this requirement would be if the California Legislature repealed these laws or passed an amendment that would exempt a new nuclear plant.”

The Fresno Nuclear Energy Group, a consortium that includes Republican State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore and chairman of the Fresno Utilities Commission John Hutson, is raising money to build the first new nuclear reactor in California since the early ‘80s. The group is talking openly of overturning California’s 32-year-old law, but is waiting for California opinion polls to reach sixty percent approval ratings for new nuclear energy facilities before it begins collecting signatures for a ballot initiative.

They may not need to wait long. In July, the San Francisco Chronicle, citing a Field poll, reported that for the first time since the ‘70s, half of Californians support building nuclear plants in the state. “The assumption is that California is now and forever allergic to nuclear,” says Brand. “Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi are taking the same line as Barack Obama, which is that nuclear needs to be part of the mix. We may see a surprising switch in this area because there is so much need for power.”

The R&D race is on to overcome limitations of both nuclear and renewable energy sources. Whether nuclear remains part of California’s low-carbon mix fifty years from now is uncertain. For now, the issue remains…radioactive.

The Farm Bill’s many elements are organized into ten “Titles.” One of the most contentious is Title I, which primarily subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton. The federal government pays farmers to produce as much of these crops as possible. The effects of this free-market-tweaking policy could fill a book, but the most obvious is that farmers are rewarded for growing subsidized crops as monocrops for export, animal feed, and biofuels, rather than growing non-subsidized diverse market crops that could provide food for their surrounding communities and urban centers. According to the Congressional Research Service, the top 10 percent of farm-subsidy recipients (mostly corporations and absentee landowners) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

This represents a considerable government giveaway to already-profitable farms. Last time the Farm Bill was passed, a coalition of Senators argued to lower the cap on subsidies from a half million to a quarter of a million dollars, claiming that “millionaire farmers” were reaping all the benefits of the legislation, and that it favored the consolidation of farms by pushing the smallest farms out of business and undermining the economic development of small farming communities.

The overproduction of these commodities has significant consequences. Because the prices of these crops are kept artificially low by government handouts, an enormous industry has sprung up around their byproducts—the oils, flours, starches, sugars, and food additives ubiquitous in junk food and the cheap feed that cattle eat at feedlots. In effect, the federal government is making bad food cheap. According to Michael Pollan, the real price of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent between 1985 and 2000. In the same period, the price of soft drinks (which primarily consist of high fructose corn syrup) went down by 23 percent. Imagine—your tax dollars are paying for candied soda pop. The subsidies greatly impact what low-income individuals can afford to eat.

Ironically, Title IV manages the Food Stamp program, also providing nutrition outreach to low-income households, to encourage food stamp eligible citizens to consume more fresh fruits and vegetables—the very crops that the government doesn’t subsidize. In the past, urban area legislators have fixed their sights on the food stamp component and ignored most of the other Titles, including rural land-use issues.

This year, several urban legislators are taking the Food Stamp Challenge—that is, trying to eat for a week on $21, the typical allotment of a food stamp recipient. Early in June, Representative Barbara Lee could be found scouring the aisles of Berkeley’s Grocery Outlet, trying to spend her last $6 wisely. Unlike most food stampers, Lee was trailed by the press during her hunt through the store. Her message: it is impossible for people to eat a healthy diet on food stamp benefits, and multiple aspects of the Farm Bill must be addressed for this to change. The foods affordable to low-income families are the same that are creating a public health crisis of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related disease—and the same foods kept artificially cheap by government subsidies.

Conservation and the protection of water, air, wildlife habitat, and farmland is the concern of Title II, a category whose funding is chopped away every year by Bush’s budget. One of II’s provisions is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which rewards livestock and crop producers for making conservation and environmental improvements. Some of these improvements, however, you wouldn’t wish on your best friend—and certainly not your next door neighbor’s land.

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists submitted an excellent brief to the House Committee on Agriculture, analyzing perverse incentives in Title II and recommending remedies. The organization is particularly critical of the EQIP provisions that actually underwrite and promote the expansion of large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are bona-fide disasters from the standpoint of waste treatment, profligate use of antibiotics, and E. coli contamination.

Title III of the Farm Bill contains programs designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities. Unfortunately, the cheapness of the commodities subsidized by Title I gives our producers an unfair advantage over our so-called “free trade” agreement partners. Mexican corn growers, for example, cannot compete with the subsidized US corn that is dumped into their country, driving Mexican farmers out of business and indirectly creating economic refugees who may immigrate to urban centers in the US and elsewhere.

Title VII funds agricultural research and extension programs, including grants for food biosecurity and developing biotechnology crops for poor countries. In the last Farm Bill, a tiny wedge of funds was earmarked to support research and extension activities for organic agriculture. Needless to say, in Title VII and others, the federal government gives large-scale industrial agriculture and its methods a heavily weighted economic advantage over organic and small-scale family farms.

The behemoth Farm Bill of 2002 was launched with little fanfare. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress had little appetite for heated or prolonged debate about domestic issues, and we were about to invade Afghanistan. In the years since, skyrocketing obesity and Type II diabetes rates, E. coli scares, and books and films like Fast Food Nation, SuperSize Me, and the Omnivore’s Dilemma have alerted the public that all is not right with our food and farming systems. Finally, scrutiny is turning to the role the federal government plays in this mess.

The Farm Bill can be a powerful vehicle, capable of driving entrepreneurship and research, protecting species and restoring habitat, supporting public health, and strengthening rural communities and regional food systems. With enough public input, this year’s bill might just fulfill its promise.

Amy Kiser: In your 2006 book, Crashing the Gate, you had harsh words for environmentalists and their failed political strategies.

Markos Moulitsas: It’s clear that one of the reasons that conservatives have been so successful the past few years is that they worked together as a movement, pooling their resources to promote each other’s agenda, which is the overall conservative agenda. The “vast right wing conspiracy” supposedly has a budget of about half a billion dollars a year, which seems like a lot of money.

One of the things that shocked me as I was doing research for Crashing the Gate was the realization that the top six environmental organizations that focus on advocacy and promoting environmental issues had a budget of over 600 million dollars. Just the top six environmental organizations have more money than the entire vast right-wing conspiracy combined. So how can the right possibly be so much more successful with their agenda when clearly we have more money? It’s not an issue of money. It comes down to the fact that they all work together in concert on behalf of a broader conservative agenda while we are divided in our individual issue silos.

What has stood in the way of environmental groups working with other traditionally progressive interest groups?

It’s cultural, and it’s the way it’s been done for a long time. I’ve been at conferences where everybody is whining that their issue isn’t being discussed. Everybody wants to talk about their issue; they don’t want to talk about anyone else’s. It’s that myopia—that unwillingness to consider that a world exists beyond their particular concerns—that is so destructive. I don’t know if it’s a question of egos, or a belief that there’s a finite amount of funding available and the group that screams the loudest and is the most alarmist gets the money. At the end of the day, there’s an unwillingness to look beyond the short-term.

You may get short-term coalitions that form around specific campaigns, but it’s not anything like what the right does. What the right does is say, “The next couple of weeks we’re going to be focused on lowering taxes.” The NRA will start talking about lowering taxes, and the Christian coalition will talk about lowering taxes, and the tax groups will naturally be talking about lowering taxes, all the groups knowing that in a few weeks, a few months, or a few years, they will be called up to talk about protecting gun rights or the “family values” agenda.

The right is a lot more top-bottom, so it’s easy for, say, a Grover Norquist to say, “I’m the king of the heap, and I’ll decide what the agenda is and you all come along for the ride.” Clearly this will never happen on the progressive side because of a general distrust for authoritarianism and a who the hell are you to tell me what to do? kind of mentality. It can’t be done the exact same way the right does, but there has to be an understanding that we’re in this together and that we have to promote each other’s issues in pursuit of the greater progressive good.

A perfect example: Women’s groups and environmental groups were supporting Republican Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island. Had the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, NARAL, and NOW had their way, and Lincoln Chaffee had been elected to the Senate, right now we would have Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader—Mitch McConnell, who’s below zero on choice and other women’s issues and has been a disaster on environment issues. Who would be in control of the environmental committee? Senator James Imhoff, who thinks global warming is one of the greatest hoaxes in American history.

The fact is that these groups were not looking at the bigger, broader picture. They would say, “Well, Lincoln Chaffee is good on my issue,” not understanding that Lincoln is enabling a party that is absolute poison to everything that progressives care about.

Many people were surprised to hear President Bush utter the words “global climate change” during the last State of the Union address.

We knew this was coming. On Bush’s side of the aisle, the issue has been driven by the religious right. There’s a whole school of thought within the Christian right that the world is God’s creation, and we must protect it. That idea has taken root. Very viscerally, people understand the problem with climate change: they see it and they sense it. Everybody’s weather has been so screwy these past few years.

As Senator Jim Webb put it, this is the sixth SOTU address that Bush has talked about alternative fuels and then done zero to make it happen. It’s been a year that global warming has been high on the agenda, thanks to Al Gore. The Christian right is gunning for it, An Inconvenient Truth won best documentary at the Oscars, and the weight of evidence is so heavy. I don’t think that Bush had much of a choice. He can’t at this point promote an aggressive conservative agenda, because many of those issues have proven to be big losers with the public.

Of course, Bush couldn’t talk about alternative energy sources without lumping “clean coal” and nuclear energy in with the renewables.

I’m a big supporter of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is one of the heaviest proponents of clean coal technology and carbon sequestration. Right now we’re dependent on the Middle East for a large percentage of our energy needs, and it’s clearly making us weaker from a national security perspective. It precipitated the horrid war in Iraq, and it may precipitate another one with Iran. Anything that weans us off that foreign energy and makes us self-dependent I think is a better thing in the short term. The Brian Schweitzers of the world are also heavily promoting wind energy in the Rocky Mountain West.

I hear that you’re formulating ideas for your next book, which will focus on a new breed of Democrat rising up in the Rocky Mountain West: the libertarian Democrat.

A traditional libertarian would say that government shouldn’t get involved in anything except maybe defense. Corporations can swoop down into public lands, rape the land, and leave it a disaster and that’s okay, because who is government to say they can’t do that?

The way I define Democrat libertarianism—or liberal libertarianism—is like this: people want to be left alone and to be able to enjoy their life. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: that’s what everyone wants at the end of the day. There are things that can infringe on that liberty: government can do it and corporations can do it, too. They can come in and destroy your land and foul up your air and water. Now, where traditional libertarianism has gotten into trouble has been when they’ve let private companies run roughshod over people, whether it is energy companies coming in and defiling the land in the Rocky Mountain West or governments and corporations accessing and sharing our private information.

Traditional liberal strategy has been more aggressive in calling for government intervention than I have become. I have a lot of faith in the market as being self-correcting, especially now that technology and the pace of progress has become so fast. Any monopolies are fairly short-term. I find that I’m a lot less likely to call for government intervention now than I was in the late ‘90s.

During the last election, there were indications of a political shift amongst voters in the Rocky Mountain West. What is your take on this phenomenon?

It’s because their personal liberties are being infringed upon. In this case, it’s not by the government, which was their previous enemy. This time it’s the energy companies, and suddenly they’re realizing we can’t fight against these energy companies. The only entity that can fight for us is the government.

Clearly, things are shifting in the Rocky Mountain West politically, and there’s going to be a seismic shift in the next two decades. I don’t think that people in DC understand it. I don’t even think that traditional Democrats understand it. It’s an evolution in thought about what government should be. The world is changing, and I think that a lot of Democrats are still stuck in the 1940s and keep advocating the same things, not realizing that if we are to grow and prosper, we have to embrace those changes and start advocating and promoting new policies.

One of the things that I like about the rise of Rocky Mountain libertarian Democrats is that their issues are not incompatible with urban Democrats. The issues that are important to them might not overlap, but they are not mutually exclusive. The new libertarian Democrat may have a problem with rampant overspending or government over-regulating small businesses, but that’s a fight over the minor details. There’s a lot of common ground.

At the end of the day, what helps make that happen is that people in the Mountain West are realizing that okay, I guess it’s not just the government that can mess with my life. There are other forces out there like global capitalism that can strip away my liberties. We need somebody to protect us, and it ain’t gonna be the Republicans.

In this era of federal backsliding, municipalities are leading the charge to reenvision cities as greener, cleaner, healthier, more efficient, and economically vibrant places to live. Berkeley has long set the pace; we benefit from a critical mass of citizens whose shared values have led to the creation and support of environmentally progressive projects and policies.

Thirty years ago, the environmental movement consisted of a smattering of activists and volunteers, such as the people who founded the Ecology Center. These days, sustainability projects are led by businesses, government agencies, school districts, and other institutions in addition to the nonprofits, grassroots groups, and passionate individuals who historically formed the backbone of the effort. Environmental values are far more deeply woven into Berkeley’s fabric than in the past.

But diversification has brought new challenges: the last few years, we at the Ecology Center have noticed that many people involved in sustainability work are unaware of what their peers are doing. We’ve also seen a trend toward specialization; groups commit themselves to deep knowledge and activism on very specific subjects, and important linkages between related issues are lost. Inefficiencies result, with groups spinning their wheels to find out what someone in the next block or organization knows intimately.

We wanted to provide a forum in which all the players could regain a sense of the incredible variety of the sustainability universe and could connect for strategic and inspirational reasons. As one summit attendee remarked, “I’m pretty plugged in, yet I heard lots of new things yesterday.”

The Summit was a gamble: just because we thought there was a need for such a forum did not mean that others would want to participate. But the gamble paid off. The crowd of over 170 attendees proved that the Berkeley’s sustainability movement is comprised of proactive people eager for cross-pollination. Between the sponsors, speakers, and audience members, over 60 local groups, agencies, businesses, and institutions engaged in sustainability work were represented.

Speakers had five minutes to convey the essence of their project or service. Topics included current city sustainability policies, EcoHouse, consumer biofuels, environmental management at Bayer, transportation planning, community aggregated energy purchasing, solar generation, commercial and residential water and energy conservation measures, youth development, sustainable food systems, the School Lunch Initiative, Zero Waste, the David Brower Center, certified green businesses, affordable housing development, green building programs, green-collar jobs, greening health care and dentistry, air quality in West Berkeley, the development of the Santa Fe Right-of-Way, community gardens, municipal greenhouse gas reduction, sustainability projects on UC Berkeley campus, the Creeks Ordinance, and a cross-sector working group called Sustainable Berkeley. During the several structured networking sessions, attendees huddled around “topic tables,” engaging in discussion and hatching ideas. The energy and positivity in the historic Krutch Theater were palpable. The summit reinforced the connections between our individual efforts to move toward a better future. One speaker described the event as “informative, uplifting, inclusive, and delicious,” and expressed the hope that it would become an annual event. We hope to oblige!

How Would a Patriot Act?, which chronicles the expansion of presidential powers under the Bush Administration, broke ground in other ways: in just over three months, it went from an idea to a manuscript to a bestseller. Not as well known is its manner of production: the first printing was on 100 percent post-consumer waste recycled paper and the second on 100 percent recycled paper with half post-consumer waste. The decision to use 100 percent post-consumer waste recycled paper was made at the start, to demonstrate that progressive literature could be printed in a manner consistent with a commitment to the environment—and be successful to boot. So far, 40,000 books have been printed without a tree felled. Now that’s patriotic!

In 1984, the chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India killed and sickened thousands of people. Fearing a similar disaster in the US, Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) in 1986. Among other requirements, the law forces industrial facilities that handle toxic chemicals to publicly report their chemical waste and emissions. This provision is known as the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), and stands as one of the most powerful right-to-know laws in the country.

The TRI forces individual facilities to report the release, disposal, incineration, treatment, or recycling of 650 chemical compounds, among them some of the most hazardous to human health and the environment, such as benzenes and phthalates. While the TRI does not impose limits, the reporting requirements have effectively induced manufacturers to voluntarily reduce their pollution.

Last year, the EPA under the Bush administration proposed big changes to the TRI. Annual reporting would be replaced with biennial reporting, and facilities needn’t report their waste and emissions in “off” years. And compared to requirements today, companies could produce ten times the amount of pollution (from 500 to 5,000 pounds per year) before reporting would be required. This May, the House of Representatives voted for the Toxic Right-To-Know amendment in an attempt to prevent the EPA from dismantling the TRI. Most Republicans voted against the amendment, which was sponsored by Reps. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Hilda Solis (D-CA), but enough crossed party lines for it to pass. Whether it will pass in the Senate or be vetoed by Bush is uncertain.

The Environmental Working Group has identified 101 California facilities that could stop reporting their use or release of toxic chemicals under the Bush plan. Among those plants exempted from detailed reporting would be 17 facilities in Alameda County, 20 in Contra Costa County, and 10 in Santa Clara County.

In response to this imminent rollback of the public’s right to know, California State Senator Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo/San Francisco) has sponsored Senate Bill 1478, which would establish a California database of toxic releases similar to the current law. If Bush succeeds in weakening the federal standards for reporting, SB 1478 will ensure that the state’s chemical reporting standards remain strong. Speier’s bill has passed out of the Senate and is now in the Assembly.

Babies and Bug Spray

The Healthy Schools Act of 2000 compelled public schools to notify parents of upcoming pesticide applications on campus and to post notices in areas where pesticides were applied. It also offered school staffers training in least-toxic Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Six years later, the advocacy group Environment California has trained its sights on another realm where children spend a substantial amount of time: daycare facilities. The group sponsored AB 2865, the Healthy Day Cares Bill, which closely mirrors the provisions of the Healthy Schools Act. It requires private licensed daycare facilities to notify parents about pesticide applications, post signs after application, and give daycare providers IPM information and training.

A recent US Environmental Protection Agency study revealed that levels of pesticides found in dust were significantly higher in daycare settings than in residential homes. Children’s exposure to pesticides has been linked to persistent asthma and increased risk of childhood leukemia.

The Healthy Day Cares Bill has passed out of the Assembly and is now headed for the Senate.

Stationary Stinkers

In 2002, California was the first state to pass a law that set greenhouse gas limits: AB 1493 mandated the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from noncommercial vehicles such as cars and light-duty trucks starting with 2009 models. This year, Speaker of the California State Assembly Fabian Nunez reintroduced AB 32, which sets binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources such as power plants, oil refineries, and landfills. The bill also directs the California Air Resources Board to institute an emissions reporting and tracking system to monitor compliance with the limits.

Under AB 32, global warming pollution would be reduced by 145 million tons by 2020, cutting forecasted emissions for that year by 25 percent. Predictably, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes the bill, fearing that it will discourage economic growth, increase the cost of business in the state, and jeopardize the availability of an adequate energy supply. Because developing nations such as India and China will continue to expand their fossil-fuel dependent economies, they argue, a California-only cap on emissions will do very little to reduce global greenhouse gases.

Supporters of the bill counter that California is the tenth largest carbon dioxide pollution in the world, and someone must take the lead. And advocates point out that there is an economic upside: regulating greenhouse gas emissions shields the state from fluctuations in the price of oil, speeds up innovation, and lowers the pollutants that also cause smog, soot, and toxic air pollution. AB 32 passed out of the Assembly and is now in the Senate.

Methane Diplomacy

On June 15, California signed an agreement with Sweden to advance the use of renewable fuels, with a particular emphasis on “biogas” for motor vehicles. Biogas—also called digester gas, swamp gas, or landfill gas—refers to the combination of methane and other gases produced by the fermentation of organic matter such as manure, wastewater sludge, or biodegradable feedstock.

Sweden’s energy goals are ambitious: the country aims to end its dependency on fossil fuels by 2020. California hopes to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. State legislators saw mutual opportunity: California can benefit from Sweden’s biogas expertise while Sweden can benefit from the sale of products and research to California markets. Thousands of cars and buses in Sweden are currently powered by biogas, while California has millions of tons of biomass that could be converted if we only had the know-how.

Mixed Messages on Smog

A fourth of the pesticides used in California every year are fumigants, used to kill pests and pathogens in cotton, carrot, almond, and strawberry crops. The fumigants are injected into the soil, and lead to the formation of ground-level smog and health problems in agricultural communities. (See page 5 for a related story.)

Two years ago, a lawsuit was brought against the state by the Community and Children’s Advocates Against Pesticide Poisoning, El Comité Para el Bienestar de Earlimart, and three other citizens’ groups from the San Joaquin Valley and Ventura County. In April of this year, US District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that California was violating the Clean Air Act and that it must significantly reduce volatile organic compound emissions from fumigants and other pesticides in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere by 2008.

The state Department of Pesticide Regulation is appealing the judge’s decision, claiming that the Clean Air Act was not violated. Yet, the same week in June that the state filed its appeal, the department unveiled a new initiative to curb volatile organic compounds from fumigants and institute regulations by 2008.

The state admits that the new initiative was launched in part to address the court case, and a spokesperson from the Department of Pesticide Regulation claims that the initiative will meet or exceed the standards laid out in the judge’s order.

Monsanto vs. Counties

A Monsanto-sponsored bill, introduced in early 2005 by Shafter Democratic Senator Dean Florez, has been resurrected in the state’s agriculture committee. As amended in June by Florez and numerous coauthors, the bill prohibits counties from banning or otherwise regulating nursery starts or seeds. It says that “provisions of law relating to nursery stock and seed are of statewide concern” and it reserves to the state the power to label, sell, store, or register such stock. It does not mention genetic modification, but SB 1056 was geared to challenge bans on GMOs passed in Mendocino, Marin, and Trinity counties, the cities of Arcata and Point Arena, and the ten-year moratorium just enacted in Santa Cruz County. In the latest round of amendments to the bill, these bans would stand, as provisions will not apply to ordinances enacted before July 1, 2006. Observers predict that the bill will be debated as hotly as a Sacramento summer once it reaches the Assembly.

Hetchy and Scratchy

Ever since the Tuolumne River was dammed 83 years ago, the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park has been under water. The reservoir created by the dam has stored water for 2.4 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Draining the glacial valley and restoring its dramatic grandeur has endured as an environmentalist’s dream, albeit an unlikely one.

A feasibility study commissioned by the Schwarzenegger administration reviewed options for reclaiming the Hetch Hetchy Valley and storing San Francisco’s water in other locations. The reservoir is one of nine in the same system, so the alternatives are likely to involve expanding others or storing water underground. The study is preliminary, but it keeps the option of a drained Hetch Hetchy on the table.

Recently, the Assembly health and toxics committee held its first hearing on AB 319, a bill introduced by Assemblymember Wilma Chan (D-Alameda), that would ban the manufacture and sale of toys and childcare products containing phthalates and bisphenol A. These chemicals are found in hard, clear-plastic bottles, dishes, teething rings, vinyl books, and beach balls. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are also found in the bodies of most Americans.

EPA research biologist Earl Gray testified that scientists have conducted lab tests on phthalates for 25 years, and findings have shown disruption in the production of testosterone that can result in low sperm count, malformations of sexual organs, and disruption of the endocrine system. Biologist Frederick von Saal, who has conducted dozens of studies of bisphenol A, told legislators that no state or nation has assessed the literature on the harmful effects of low doses. Bisphenol A has been associated with changes in brain, pancreas, and thyroid function, as well as hormone levels and behavior. It has been linked with the increased secretion of insulin, which can lead to Type II diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Testifying against the bill were chemical and toy industry representatives and their own researchers. Jim Lamb, senior vice president of the Weinberg Group, an organization representing manufacturers, said that the research findings were not relevant because testing has been done on rats using much higher chemical concentrations. Compelling manufacturers to make products with the “least toxic alternative” would force them to use chemicals that have been tested even less than the compounds in question, he said. Toxicologist Lorenz Rhomberg from the American Plastics Council said no regulatory body has restricted the use of bisphenol A, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

Some manufacturers, such as Evenflo and Medela, already have phased out phthalates and bisphenol A in baby bottles and other products. Newer products sport “PVC free” labels, meaning that they don’t include the polyvinyl chloride plastics that contain phthalates. These compounds have been banned in the European Union and 14 other nations. After the hearing, AB 319 was killed in committee. Chan is considering reintroducing the bill or attaching it to a different piece of legislation.

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Children’s exposure to toxic substances has been the focus of other activity in Sacramento: In January, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) made California the first state to categorize secondhand tobacco smoke as a “toxic air contaminant.” This ruling may revive legislative efforts to ban drivers from smoking when children are in the car and curb smoking in multifamily dwellings.

CARB’s ruling was bolstered by the California EPA’s new research findings documenting a causal link between secondhand smoke exposure and pre-term delivery; asthma induction in adults; breast cancer in younger, primarily pre-menopausal women; heart disease and lung and nasal sinus cancer in adults; and sudden infant death syndrome. The report, which underwent a four-year scientific review process that included public comment, contained the first-ever outdoor monitoring of secondhand smoke exposure near designated smoking areas in California.

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Children are the winners in California Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s lawsuit against 71 major retailers and distributors of costume jewelry containing lead. The businesses, which sell the lead-laced baubles mainly to children and teens, failed to warn consumers about lead-related health risks, a requirement under California’s Proposition 65. In January, many of the retailers reached an agreement with the state that includes a $1.8 million settlement, new standards for lead-free and low-lead content jewelry by 2008, and an industry-financed education program. While many companies agreed to the settlement, litigation continues with Wal-Mart, Jordache, Papaya Stores, Gerson Co., and Royal Items.

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Meanwhile, Proposition 65, which requires warning labels on foods containing chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects, faces a potential challenge from the federal government. In December, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the National Uniformity for Food Act. The bill has a good chance of passing in the House, where over 226 representatives, including Central Valley lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, cosponsored it. In the Senate, its fate is uncertain; Dianne Feinstein is urging her congressional colleagues to reject the proposal.

The National Uniformity for Food Act would prohibit states—after a three-year waiting period—from establishing or continuing food safety warning rules that differ from FDA rules. States could petition the FDA for an exemption, but they must prove to federal regulators that the stricter rules “would not unduly burden interstate commerce.” The legislation would effectively gut the food-labeling component of California’s Prop 65.

For his part, Lockyer is pressing for greater enforcement of Prop 65, including forcing french fry and potato chip manufacturers to post warning notices over the chemical acrylamide and demanding that canned tuna producers post labels warning of mercury. Both of these represent ongoing California lawsuits that would collapse with the passage of the National Uniformity for Food Act. For more information, contact California League for Environmental Enforcement Now (CLEEN) at (510) 654‑6148 or info@cleenca.org.

Amy Kiser: The Pentagon partly sponsored your study. How did this partnership occur?

Nathan Glasgow: The project was co-sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Naval Research. They were interested in the project for tactical, logistic, and strategic reasons; they realized that fuel efficiency may be a key parameter. What we see is a shift away from the military fighting large land-based wars to being deployable anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. Fuel inefficient platforms slow down this deployability and may also decrease effectiveness. For example, for each fighting force, there are between two and three logistical units. The logistical units are primarily hauling fuel. The savings of any unit of fuel will be multiplied through the supply chain.

Making vehicles lighter and reducing drag are central tenets of your strategy. You see great potential in using carbon composites for auto bodies. But aren’t composites petroleum-based?

Bicycle frames are an example of the transition to carbon composites, aluminum, and lightweight steel, all of which can be used to make cars lighter, stronger, more efficient, and better performing. The amount of petroleum required to manufacture a light, strong vehicle would be rapidly dwarfed by the amount of gasoline saved driving it. Furthermore, these composites have a high potential for being able to be recycled. Large markets do not yet exist because it’s primarily used in aerospace and high-end sports cars, but as the volumes go up, it appears likely that a market for recycling could appear.

A centerpiece of your strategy is ramping up production of biofuels, including ethanol. Many environmentalists dismiss ethanol as a subsidized giveaway to corn-growing states, because the petroleum inputs required to produce it nearly equal the petroleum it replaces in your tank. Is that thinking outdated?

Conventional ethanol technology uses corn in the US and sugarcane in Brazil. Currently, over a quarter of Brazil’s gasoline demand is met with ethanol. There are new ethanol technologies, called cellulosic, which have the potential to be cost-competitive with gasoline without subsidies and also have about twice as much energy output per unit of feedstock input as conventional ethanol technologies. We know of three pilot plants that are making cellulosic ethanol on a small scale. It has yet to be done on a commercial scale, but there’s good pilot plant data and companies are rapidly moving forward to commercialize the technology. We are technology-neutral and would like the market to choose the winners.

Elsewhere, taxes, standards, and government mandates force foreign automakers to push the technological envelope. In the US, those kinds of government incentives are political suicide. Is the market-based approach you favor born of your professional bias as economists or it is rooted in an understanding that certain government solutions will not be embraced here?

The latter. Although we’re trained as economists, we don’t think of ourselves solely as economists. We see the market, up to a point, as being able to lead us in the right direction. To use Amory’s quote, “Markets make a splendid servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” We think that policies should be market-oriented. That’s not our bias; it’s what we think will work here in the US. Ideally, the government should lead the transition. If they aren’t going to lead, they should follow the states’ lead. And if they aren’t going to do that, we’d just hope they would get out of the way and stop providing perverse incentives.

What’s an example of a perverse incentive?

The so-called Hummer tax credit for small businesses is an example of an incentive not in line with the country’s best interests. Electricity is also usually mispriced, and 48 states reward distribution utilities for selling more electricity and penalize them for cutting customers’ bills.

Do you see California as uniquely positioned to take the lead on some of your recommendations?

Absolutely. California would be great for a number of reasons: one, for the amount of gasoline the state consumes. If California were a country, its oil consumption would rank third in the world. Two, because of the enormous number of new cars in the state. And three, because the state leads the country with automobile emissions statutes. One easy thing that California could do—and this one’s going out to Arnold—is government fleet procurement… for someone in the administration to say, “We’re going to buy best-in-class fuel-efficient vehicles for all our state and local government fleets.” This would not only show consumers that these vehicles are available, safe, and reliable, it would give manufacturers the guaranteed demand they need to produce them. If every state would do this and the federal government would follow, it would send a very strong signal to manufacturers.

RMI proposes a new option to guide consumer choice toward fuel-efficient vehicles: “feebates.” Explain the concept.

A feebate is a combination of a fee and a rebate that a consumer will encounter when they purchase any vehicle. Within any size class, a fee placed on inefficient vehicles will pay for a rebate placed on efficient vehicles. It’s revenue-neutral to the state or federal treasury and it would continuously drive improvement, because you could ratchet up the median point within any size category to push technology.

Many Americans associate the post-oil-embargo 1970s with long lines at the filling station and the advent of ugly compact cars. RMI views that time as a positive touchstone. Why?

We think of that era as an example of what can be done and what has worked before. For example, during the period following the 1979 oil shock, the US cut its oil use 17 percent, while our GDP increased 27 percent. So we’ve done it before, and the roadmap that we suggest to get our country completely off oil is less aggressive than what occurred during that period. With the advent of new, advanced materials it is now possible to have a large pickup truck, but to make it strong and lightweight, which increases its safety and makes it much more efficient.

How do we move beyond the cultural stereotypes that gas-guzzling = tough, that heavy = safe?

The truth is quite the opposite. In the military, making a vehicle more efficient will give it longer range. It will require less refueling, so it will be subject to less vulnerability, increased performance, and lots of other beneficial characteristics. The same is true with light vehicles. These heavy sluggish trucks we drive have slow acceleration because it takes longer to get all that weight up to operating speed. Lighter vehicles accelerate much faster. They would also corner much better because they would have reduced top-side weight. Real-world examples will help change the public misconception. You see a number of stars driving the Toyota Prius right now, and there’s a six-to-nine month wait period to buy one.

There are some great alternatives to petroleum products out there: like the asphalt replacement made from concrete and chipped tires. Who most needs to know about these alternatives?

Decision-makers in general. Companies would lead this transition. There are a number of roles the average citizen could play. One would be to demand more efficient vehicles, as we are doing now with the Prius. The average citizen can share information with people in their local, state, and federal government, as well as heads of companies they may know or boards they may sit on.

It’s a common American sentiment that “technology will save us.” Yet research and development funding is being slashed everywhere you look. Is there a gap between our belief in our own ingenuity and the amount of innovation happening?

It does not appear right now that our federal government is focused on funding large-scale energy efficiency technologies. However, there is a lot of great innovation happening in the business community.

Gasoline prices in America don’t accurately reflect the massive subsidies paid by our tax dollars. Do you think you will live long enough to see honest energy prices?

Absolutely. I’m young! Our message is very optimistic. We’re not a forecasting agency. We are saying what we can do if we make this a national priority. We could get completely off oil within the next few decades.