Terrain » Winter 2002

Biotech Briefing

Dan Rademacher — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:52:19 +0000

To induce consumers to buy their products and farmers to test and grow them, biotechnology marketers often look to economically distressed, vulnerable populations, like India’s and Zimbabwe’s — or even Kentucky’s.
But in Zambia and Zimbabwe, whose severely malnourished populations depend on food aid, governments have rejected shipments of genetically engineered (GE) whole-grain corn. They fear that the corn, if planted rather than eaten, could grow to contaminate the countries’ own natural stock, jeopardizing exports to the European Union. Widely reported this summer, the moves were seen as a statement of self-determination.
“This is a consistent line that the Zimbabwean government has taken on [GE] crops,” Raj Patel of the Oakland-based nonprofit Food First told Terrain. “Monsanto tried in 1997 or 1998 to do field trials [of GE crops] without telling the Zimbabwean government, and they got soundly rapped over the knuckles for it.”
In Kentucky, tobacco farmers are balking out of similar wariness. Though they are not starving, the farmers are losing money growing tobacco, as the industry reels from huge cash settlements over liability for smoking’s health effects. Following one such 1999 settlement, the state of Kentucky itself got nearly $3.5 billion. Half of that has been earmarked for agricultural development. Kentucky Governor Paul Patton has been pushing to use some of those funds to attract biotech companies — specifically for biopharmaceutical crops, especially tobacco.
In biopharming, companies genetically manipulate crops like corn and tobacco, seeking to reliably produce proteins useful for medical or industrial products. Farmers, accustomed to ridiculously low commodity prices, suddenly can grow much more profitable crops.
But when the state’s 118 counties set spending priorities for the settlement funds over the past year, only seven chose biotechnology.
Bill Freese, a researcher with Friends of the Earth, points out that open field-testing of bioengineered medical crops poses major risks: Traditional food crops or wild plants could be contaminated. The GE crops’ pollen could carry anything from the allergen trypsin — which has been engineered into corn — to trichosanthin, an abortion-inducing protein introduced into tobacco using a virus that can also infect tomatoes and peppers.
But that’s not the only reason farmers are balking.
“Farmers don’t want to see the tobacco settlement money going to biotechnology,” said Alysia Robben, a researcher with the Frankfort, Kentucky–based Community Farm Alliance, “because they see it as going to corporations and not to farmers.”
The first biotech company to receive state funding is a Louisville-based firm, ApoImmune, working to engineer a cancer drug into tobacco.
“If that protein works out,” Robben says, “they are going to want to produce it consistently, and year-round. I don’t see how that is going to get grown in the fields of small farmers, where you just can’t control all the variables. That’s going to happen in a greenhouse of a major pharmaceutical company.”
Nor was the irony of developing a cancer drug lost on Robben: “growing something in tobacco that cures the problem of tobacco.”
Tribby Vice, who is chairman of Fleming County’s agricultural council and a dairy and vegetable farmer with 520 acres in the northeastern part of the state, told Terrain he was “just a little bit leery of having biotech kind of crammed down our throats. We’ve been around long enough to see how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates its suppliers. We’d really just rather concentrate on ideas that we have come up with, on things that we’ve already done.”
In India, where farmers have stiffly resisted corporate biotechnology for years, a similar sentiment has produced a novel solution: an indigenous seedbank to support sustainable, locally focused agriculture. In September, several thousand farmers gathered in a village in the state of Karnataka. There, 97 small farmers had given their land, a collective 100 acres, to a new center for sustainable agriculture, with educational programs, a school of civil disobedience, and a seed-bank to collect and maintain India’s indigenous and traditional seeds.
Co-founder Professor M.D. Nanjundaswamy told Terrain that the center, called Amrita Bhoomi, or The Eternal Planet, is the culmination of a decade-long Seed Satyagraha. Created by 500,000 farmers converging on Bangalore in 1993, the Satyagraha, or “soul force,” favors community control of food sources and strongly opposes the patenting of organisms. “Seed Satyagraha,” as Nanjundaswamy put it, “is a continuous non-violent battle against intellectual property rights in agriculture.”
In Kentucky, the farmers can identify.
“What we like to see [the settlement money] go to,” Robben said, “are some obvious things: farmers’ markets, anything that pushes toward a local food economy — tobacco farmers going into vegetables.”

Human Rights

Laird Townsend — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:56:17 +0000

Call this the civil disobedience issue: Near Prescott Park in West Oakland, residents are pressing to shut down the carcinogen-producing Red Star Yeast factory with “all the tools at our disposal.” In Northern California’s Humboldt County, tree-sitters have braved arrest and jail to stop the slaughter of redwood and Douglas fir forests. At UC Berkeley’s 15-acre Gill Tract, student activists will do “whatever it takes” to block the paving of an urban farm, the very representation of sustainability.
Civil disobedience shouldn’t need to happen. But neither should the noxious smells strictly banned by Red Star Yeast’s permit; neither should Maxxam Corp.’s logging on steep slopes prone to excess runoff; neither should the development of a shopping mall on public-grant land desired for a center on urban agriculture.
Especially in this era of privatization, when public agencies are consumed with facilitating commerce, it’s becoming more difficult to plan wisely for coming generations, to control our resources so that land, air, and water don’t turn into commodities or dumps.
Residents of Stockton should not have to pry out of their city government a secret plan to contract out water services to a foreign multinational; residents of Vallejo should not lose their regional park just because Shell Gas and Power wants to sell its overseas natural gas. And Native Americans should not have the US Bureau of Land Management facilitating geothermal mining on the sacred Medicine Lake Highlands. After 10 years, members the Colorado River Indian Reservation should not still be breathing hazardous emissions at an EPA-sanctioned incinerator. Schoolchildren in the Salinas River Valley should not be exposed to methyl bromide from crop rows next to their schools. But they have been, for years.
Always, some bear more of the brunt than others.
In Richmond, California, the 20 largest industrial operations are located in or near communities where 70% of the population is African-American, and 20% live below the poverty line. “The system is just not working for us like it should,” said Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition, which has effectively mobilized against pollution in the area. “If it was, then we wouldn’t need to take direct action. [Regulators] are getting paid supposedly to look out for our interests — not to allow disproportionate impact. This is not what America is supposed to stand for,” Clark said. “This is against any sense of ethics or morality. We all deserve to be treated fairly, and we’re not.”
As we report this issue, federal policy effectively makes it legal — or at least easy — to disproportionately pollute in low-income communities of color. That won’t cut it. “We don’t think any level of exposure to poisons is acceptable,” says Clark. “Legal does not mean it’s right, does not mean it’s safe.” As long as Chevron’s costs can be displaced onto Richmond, oil will remain profitable; the existence of vulnerable populations anywhere enables continues degradation of the environment everywhere. “We may ignore problems when they only affect particular classes of people,” said Clark. “But in the end, global climate change affects all of us.”
If Clark is right, we have no choice but to shift our perspective — social justice is an environmental necessity, and a healthy environment is a human right. In short, we have to look out for each other.
“The new idea,” writes Peter Sauer in the Winter 2002 Orion magazine, “that polluting water, soils, and air, or destroying natural ecosystems might be declared violations of international human rights — crimes against humanity — is vigorously opposed by powerful political forces as insanely unrealistic, and a threat to the world’s economy.”
As that conflict plays out, regulators are caught in the middle.
Private interests shamelessly browbeat and breathe down the necks of officials in agencies from the California Department of Forestry to the US Environmental Protection Agency. That’s a problem at the heart of “regulation,” because the thing being made “regular” is a commercial system, with investors and tax coffers dependent on it. To enable that system to operate, agencies often feel compelled to sanction an acceptable level of a bad thing, even without full knowledge of how bad it is. Often they are operating under no other mandate than to normalize a commercial system, from manufacturing to disposal. That’s why the US Food and Drug Administration would rubber-stamp “biopharming.” That’s why the EPA would lie to residents that an incinerator is emitting “salt and steam” instead of dioxin. And why the threat of civil disobedience would be required to stop that poisonous burning. “We told them we wanted the incinerator stopped or we would shut it down,” Chester Street Block Association President Renee Morrison later said. “We were prepared to turn the knob ourselves, so they shut it down.”
Morrison’s boldness was backed by activist groups like San Francisco-based Greenaction. That coalition is part of a worldwide movement.
“In the thirty years since the [1972 United Nations (UN)] Stockholm Conference,” Sauer writes, “a global civil society has emerged as a powerful force . . . to define what the globalized world will become. In proportion to our population, the number and diversity of civil society organizations in the US are perhaps the greatest in the world. If we merge our collective strength with that of global civil society, we can change the culture we have lived by.” The goal, he writes, is to carry on the ideals laid out by environmentalists at the UN’s founding: “convincing this nation and the United Nations [that] a just, peaceful, safe, and healthy environment is everybody’s human right and the right of every future generation. If we, their children and grandchildren, don’t do it, our children and grandchildren will.”

Chainsaw George

Jeffrey St. Clair — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:53:04 +0000

George W. Bush, fresh off a brush-clearing operation at his Crawford ranch, vowed to fight forest fires by taking a chainsaw to the nation’s forests and the environmental laws that protect them.
Bush wants to allow the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next ten years. “The Healthy Forests Initiative” is a craven bit of political opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by his call to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling to help heal the nation after September 11.
Bush is exploiting a primal fear of fire. But the forests of North America were born of fires. Fire suppression became an obsession only after the timber giants claimed the continent’s forests. Loath to see their holdings go up in flames, they arm-twisted Congress into pouring millions of dollars into Forest Service fire-fighting programs. (For an excellent history of the political economy of forest fires, see Stephen Pyne’s 1997 Fire in America.) These programs have acted as federally funded fire insurance for the big timber companies, an ongoing corporate bailout of tens of billions of dollars.
Where did the money go? Largely to a fire-fighting infrastructure that rivals the National Guard: helicopters, tankers, satellites, airplanes, and people who are thrust, often carelessly, onto the firelines. (Read Norman Maclean’s last book, Young Men and Fire.)
Even now, after forest ecologists have proved that most forests not only tolerate but need fire, the Forest Service tries to suppress 99.7% of all wildfires. The regular, low-intensity fires that have swept through the forests for millennia have been replaced by catastrophic blazes.
The last thing a burned-over forest needs is assault by chainsaws to haul out its last living trees. The proof can be found at Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone Park: Unlogged burned forests recover quickly, feeding off the nutrients left behind. Logged burned forests persist as biological deserts, prone to mudslides, difficult to revegetate, and abandoned by salmon and deep forest birds such as spotted owl, goshawk, and marbled murrelet.
In Oregon more than 45,000 acres of Siskiyou Mountains ancient forest was torched by Forest Service crews for a backfire to “save” a town that wasn’t threatened. By one estimate, more than a third of the land burned this summer was ignited by the Forest Service as backfires. The timber industry gets to log nearly all those acres for next to nothing.
A century of unrestrained logging has vastly increased the intensity and frequency of wildfires, particularly in the West. Bush promises more of the same, accelerated and uninhibited. With global warming, persistent droughts, and invasions by alien insects and diseases, the future for American forests looks very bleak indeed.
Predictably, the Bush scheme was met with protest from the big environmental groups. But they only have themselves to blame. They helped lay the political groundwork for the Bush plan long ago.
First came a deal to jettison a federal injunction against logging in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, to appease Senator Max Baucus, friend of Robert Redford and a ranking Democrat. More than 14,000 acres of forest inside formerly protected roadless areas are now being clearcut. Then in September, a similar deal brokered by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle with the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society allowed unconstrained logging to begin in the Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux.
There’s no sign the big greens have learned their lesson.
The Oregon Natural Resources Council and Sierra Club’s “environmentalist new vision” calls for thinning (i.e., logging) operations near homes in the forest/suburb interface. In fact, there’s no evidence that thinning will reduce fires in these situations. Forest Service fire researcher Jack Cohen has found that homes and other structures will be safe from fire if roofs and landscaping within 150 feet are fireproofed, says Randal O’Toole, a forest economist at the Thoreau Institute in Bandon, Oregon. “Firebreaks along federal land boundaries, not treatments of [federal] lands within those boundaries, will protect private property.”
Any environmental outfit with a conscience would call for thinning of subdivisions, not forests. Don’t hold your breath. Too many big-time contributors to environmental groups own houses inside forests in places like Vail; Black Butte Ranch, Oregon; and Flagstaff, Arizona.
When Bush arrived in Portland on August 22 to make official his handout to big timber, he was greeted by nearly a thousand protesters, Earth First!ers, and anti-war activists. The demonstrators were beaten, gassed, and shot at with plastic bullets. Riot police even pepper-sprayed children.
This is a portent of things to come. When the laws have been suspended, the only option to protect forests will be direct action: bodies against bulldozers, young women living in trees, impromptu encampments in the snows of the Cascades and Rockies.
Not long ago, the occupation of cutting down big trees ranked as one of the most dangerous around. Now, thanks to the connivance of Bush, Daschle, and the big enviro groups, the job of protecting them will be fraught with even more peril. Those brave young forest defenders, forced into the woods as a thin green line against the chainsaws, should send their bail requests to the Sierra Club and their medical bills to the Wilderness Society.

Does the Public Own Yellowstone’s Microbes?

Robert Ito — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:51:23 +0000

For decades, researchers have braved the simmering geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park looking for heat-resistant microbes. The “bioprospectors” may be driven by the thrill of intellectual discovery in an area rich with countless tiny life forms. But every year, park officials estimate, US and international companies make billions of dollars by developing the microbes into products —everything from paper bleaches and stain removers to industrial strength paint removers. In 1966, enzymes plucked from the microbe Thermus aquaticus were used to develop a DNA “fingerprinting” process that now makes $500 million a year. Despite all that money changing hands, Yellowstone — much to the chagrin of the current park administration — has yet to see a dime.
Yellowstone’s desire for a piece of the action led park officials to make a “benefits-sharing” pact in 1997 with the San Diego-based research firm Diversa Corporation. Under the agreement, Diversa would pay royalties to the park if the company developed a marketable product from its finds. Environmental groups, including the Washington–based Edmonds Institute, filed a lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to block the deal — and by implication all such deals. A federal court ruled against the suit, but put the Yellowstone/Diversa deal on hold pending an Environmental Impact Statement, which is to be completed early next year.
What’s wrong with Yellowstone getting its cut? According to Beth Burrows, president of the Edmonds Institute, commercial endeavors like the Diversa contract place the Park Service into two conflicting roles: protector and profiteer.
“I don’t happen to think that we own the microorganisms,” she says. “We’re their stewards.” Money, Burrows believes, may shift park loyalties — along with its management, priorities, and staffing — from wildlife to royalty payments.
Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the International Center for Technology Assessment, also questions the ethics of issuing patents on “products of nature.” While one can’t acquire exclusive rights on, say, a California redwood, there are hundreds of patents for flora and fauna that have been manipulated in the lab or on the stem, from roses and apricots to microbes and mice. Tweak a chicken’s genetic makeup and it’s no longer a chicken; in Yellowstone Park lingo, it’s a “research result,” and potentially the sole property of a single company. Mendelson sees this as simply bad public policy. “The free exchange of information without commercial motive,” he argues, “directs research to things that are more beneficial to society.”
But the issue goes beyond research, says Burrows. “The whole history of the patenting of life shows that it’s one big slippery slope,” she says. “Once we consider everything a commodity, it’s no step at all to consider ourselves commodities. At the end of that slippery slope, we can have no social contracts. Commodities do not have social contracts with each other.”
Details of the Yellowstone/Diversa contracts — including the amounts of the royalty payments — are considered confidential business information by the two parties. Burrows finds this secrecy untenable. “The parks belong to the people of the United States,” she says. “Whatever happens in those parks should be the conscious decisions of the owners. It should not be something done behind their backs.”

Shell Seeks Vallejo Foothold For Overseas Gas

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:49:00 +0000

A proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility on Mare Island in San Pablo Bay would pose major health and safety threats while increasing California’s vulnerability to the natural gas market, say energy consultants.
“Renewables could meet our needs,” said CalPIRG policy analyst Brad Heavner. “This [project] would guarantee further reliance on foreign fossil fuels when we really don’t need it.”
The $1.3 billion LNG facility, proposed by Shell Gas and Power and Bechtel Enterprises, would bring in as many as three tankers of LNG each week under the Golden Gate Bridge. As early as December, Vallejo’s city council will vote whether to go forward with a feasibility study on the plan.
LNG — natural gas cooled to –270°F to drastically reduce its volume — is explosive in contained spaces, and highly flammable when mixed with air. If the 950-foot tanker leaks, LNG can form a ground-hugging plume up to three miles long, according to a US Department of Energy study.
The plume, says San Diego air quality consultant Bill Powers of the Border Power Plant Working Group, “looks just like a low-lying fog.” It ignites at the first spark it meets. “You see the flame traveling back towards the tanker or other LNG source in a matter of seconds,” says Powers, “and there’s no way to stop that. And if there’s anything [flammable] on the ground, it will also ignite.”
The proposed LNG site is a quarter-mile from a planned 1,400-home development scheduled for groundbreaking on Mare Island mid-2004, and less than a mile from Vallejo’s waterfront.
In 1944, an LNG leak at a power plant in Cleveland created a fire that killed 128 people and leveled a square mile of the city.
A 1979 LNG fire in Cove Point, Massachusetts, killed one person. No major accidents have involved LNG tankers, but the ships are, says energy consultant Bill Marcus, “a major terrorist target. You want to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge? Ram an airplane into one of these things as it passes beneath it.”
Due to security concerns, LNG tankers entering Boston Harbor now travel with a two-mile buffer zone, enforced by the Coast Guard. In July, LNG importer El Paso Corporation withdrew its proposal to build an LNG facility on Radio Island in South Carolina, after local residents raised safety concerns.
At the Mare Island facility, which would include a tanker unloading dock and a re-gasification plant to return LNG to its expanded state, Shell would use only 15% of the gas to fuel a 900-megawatt power plant, sending the rest — potentially 5,100 megawatts’ worth — into the state market. That’s about 50% of the entire output of all the new gas-fired plants recently approved for construction statewide. It would provide a foothold in California’s natural gas market to Shell, the world’s largest producer of natural gas from outside the United States. According to industry reports, the company is not a major domestic producer, and owns none of the pipelines that supply natural gas to Californians, nor any of the four LNG terminals on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
Asked if the company was banking on higher consumer prices, Shell spokesperson Jimmy Fox said, “We expect California to continue to grow. LNG is a profitable product.” Says CalPIRG’s Heavner: “The only way it will be profitable is if our energy prices go up.”
And that’s exactly what will happen, says Tyson Slocum of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, so long as California fails to diversify its energy sources. “As multiple federal investigations are showing,” says Slocum, “the real problem in the California energy market was not necessarily inadequate power plants. It was the manipulation of natural gas supplies and access to power plants.”
The more Californians rely on a single fuel source, Slocum says, the more vulnerable we are to the companies that control it — and, in Shell’s case, to the countries that produce it: likely Pacific Rim countries such as Indonesia. With increased demand for gas, the Department of Energy projects an increase in LNG imports from overseas sources. “After our traumas in the Middle East,” says Powers, “why would we set up such a tenuous supply line?”
News of the Shell/Bechtel LNG proposal came just as Vallejo earned the local air district’s 2002 Clean Air Champion award for proposed solar and wind projects [see Terrain, Winter 2001]. Both plans are in initial stages, according to city officials.
The LNG proposal surprised Vallejo residents who had been told that part of Mare Island would soon become a regional park. The island provides habitat to a wide range of raptors and songbirds who live on or migrate through it. Mare Island is also home to the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.
Residents also fear the plant would jeopardize plans to revitalize Vallejo’s beleaguered economy. “This would be an economic kiss of death,” says Vallejo resident Vicki Gray. “It would doom us to being a dirty blue collar town, ad infinitum. There are many more jobs that would be lost than would be gained.”
Solano County, which includes Vallejo, has the highest asthma rate in the Bay Area. Natural gas facilities burn cleaner than coal or oil. “[But] you’ve got high emissions of methane, of CO2,
sulfur dioxide, mercury, PCB, nitrogen oxide,” says Slocum.
“It’s going to be a significant source of emissions.”

Stockton’s Water “Not for Auction”

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:48:14 +0000

Residents of Stockton, California, have demanded the right to vote on a multimillion-dollar proposal to contract out operation of the city’s water system in what would be the largest water privatization on the West Coast.
“We would be turning over the operation of our most vital resource in this community to a huge conglomerate,” said Stockton City Councilwoman Ann Johnston, a supporter of an 18,000-signature petition to put the plan to a public vote. “No matter what, that company [would not be] as responsive as the local government.”
Privatization proponents say the deal, which has attracted bids from three of the world’s largest water companies and is set for a city council vote as early as November 12, would cut costs and fund improvements to help meet federal standards for wastewater.
Stockton Mayor Gary Podesto, and the council majority that supported him, tout a “public-private partnership” — the city gets low-interest financing available to public entities, and the private company provides management and engineering expertise. For 20 years, the city would contract out operation of Stockton’s water supply and waste- and stormwater systems. But it would not transfer ownership of any infrastructure. “We’re not selling one thimble of water, or one bolt at the plant to anyone,” said Podesto. “The city and city council would maintain control over rates. We would merely be contracting for an operator to turn on the pumps.”
But those were the terms in Atlanta, Georgia, which signed the largest-ever water privatization contract in 1999: a 20-year, $21-million-a-year operation and maintenance agreement with United Water, a subsidiary of French-owned Suez. Instead of cost savings and new infrastructure, the city has been flooded with complaints of dirty water and poor service, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Now, the city is trying to get out of the contract.
“If, as in Atlanta, you are dissatisfied, you have no fallback position because you have dismantled what was a functioning organization,” said Dale Stocking of the grassroots coalition Concerned Citizens of Stockton. “Especially if you let this go for 20 years, once you disband a functioning system, there’s no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
Stockton, a city of 250,000 on the San Joaquin Delta, has a blend of public and private water supply systems and an all-public waste- and stormwater treatment system. Since 1934, the Cal Water company has supplied water to the older city center without incident, though at higher rates than those of the public system. The city began supplying water to more residents as Stockton’s population grew. The public now owns over 2,600 miles of pipe, 35 wells, three reservoirs, 105 pumping stations, and two waste treatment plants.
But this is not simply a question of pipes and pumps; local democracy is at stake, said Dr. Richard Nickerson, a Stockton city councilman. Stockton’s planning efforts would be at the whim of a corporate-controlled water system, which could influence the water supply necessary for any city planning effort. “It’s setting up a hard situation for people who don’t control their water,” Nickerson told Terrain. “You can’t control your future unless you control your water. Water is the future.”
In the wake of water privatization in Bolivia, control has become an issue. In Spring 2000, residents of Cochabamba took to the streets to drive out the private water company, Aguas del Tunari, controlled by the San Francisco–based engineering giant Bechtel. The water company had raised rates by up to 300%, leaving poor residents unable to afford water. Now, using 1950s-era bilateral investment treaties that anticipated the provisions of global trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s and the still-pending Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), Bechtel is suing Bolivia for $25 million in lost future profits. The case remains before a World Bank court, which meets in secret.
“The way situations are going with the WTO, I don’t believe that the city of Stockton needs to expose itself to [any] part of a foreign company,” said Stocking, who is also a member of a city ad hoc advisory committee to review the privatization proposals. “We have to ask what potential exposure we would be opening ourselves up to.”
Though proposals from three multinational companies were submitted in July to a city consultant, they were not made public until September 9, after both the Concerned Citizens and Stockton’s daily newspaper, The Record, filed public records requests. Mayor Podesto insists that the confidentiality was necessary to make clarifications and refine the proposals in an efficient manner. But the original plans called for a final contract to be signed without any public input. The entire process was to be handled by Massachusetts-based Alternative Resources Incorporated (ARI), which is part of the National Council for Public Private Partnerships. All three of the private water company bidders are members of that council.
On October 2, 2002, ARI submitted a report — approved by a council majority a week later — favoring the approximately $600 million bid of the multinational OMI/Thames. That’s a partnership between engineering firm Operations Management International, Inc. and Thames Water, a subsidiary of the German RWE Group. The other bidders in Stockton are US Filter, a subsidiary of the financially troubled media and water giant Vivendi; and Stockton Water Service, a partnership between multinational French water giant Suez and the local company, Cal Water.
DeltaKeeper Bill Jennings says the mayor and other backers of privatization “have gone out of their way to keep all pertinent information out of the hands of the citizenry.” Similar charges have surfaced in New Orleans, where voters passed a measure requiring a popular vote on water privatization.
To Gary Wolff of the Pacific Institute, a non-profit research and policy think tank based in Oakland, Stockton’s central problem is secrecy. “It is our opinion that privatization can work, with care and proper safeguards, but without those, it shouldn’t be done at all,” Wolff said.
But to Dale Stocking, the issue is not just secrecy but privatization itself: “Water is a human necessity and not a commodity for for-profit trading,” he said. “I’m not so sure that basic resources needed for human life are things that you put up on the auction block.”
The Stockton privatization is part of a national trend, said Jane Kelly, director of the California chapter of the advocacy group Public Citizen. The US Senate bill SB 1961, she said, would require privatization studies by any city seeking federal funding for water infrastructure.
In mid-October, Stockton officials certified the Concerned Citizens’ voter initiative, which seeks a new law to require a yes-or-no vote on any major privatization scheme. It would likely go before Stockton voters in a special election, probably in January at the earliest. But the city council could decide whether to proceed with contract negotiations in November — and could approve a water privatization deal before the city-wide vote. If that happens, Stocking told Terrain, the Concerned Citizens would consider suing to block the decision.
Elsewhere in California, entrepreneurs are pushing various projects to supply wholesale or bulk water to water agencies or to the state — either for human use or to maintain ecosystems. These new private efforts range from Cadiz Inc.’s ill-fated proposal to store and mine water under the Mojave desert [see Terrain, Summer 2002], to Delta Wetland’s project to flood low islands in the Delta [see Terrain, Summer 2001], to entrepreneur Ric Davidge and World Water SA’s scheme to bag water from the Gualala and Albion rivers on the North Coast for shipment to San Diego [see Terrain, Fall 2002].
Kelly predicts that the water giants pushing into cities like Stockton might try to buy up these scattered wholesale storage and supply projects, resulting in start-to-finish private control of water. “[If] the retail and the wholesale delivery of water gets outside the democratic accountability of public control, we [would] expect to see them converge,” she told Terrain.
And corporations like Cadiz and Delta Wetlands, after drawn-out legal and regulatory wrangling, have won critical regulatory approvals from state and federal officials, though both also face threats of either more litigation or legislation to block the projects. On October 9, citing citizen pressure and financial risks, the board of the Metropolitan Water District rejected the Cadiz deal.
“[Those projects] would be as disastrous for the consumer as the deregulation of electricity,” Public Citizen’s Kelly said. “We know that when you allow a private corporation to control the public’s water, quality deteriorates and prices skyrocket.”

Dairy Air

Gabe Friedman — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:46:29 +0000

Tulare County has approved a key permit for one of California’s new generation of massive dairy farms, whose storage of manure in lagoons has raised concerns about air and water pollution.
“This is sort of a test load,” county planner Marty Beatie said about the Hilardes dairy, approved in September. “The dairy industry is sitting back and watching to see if it survives a legal challenge. We have 86 [similar] applications.”
In 1976, according to state figures, the average California dairy had 135 cows. But most of the Tulare County’s current applications call for 3,000 to 5,000 cows. Hilardes plans for 14,100.
According to the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, the average cow produces 120 pounds of manure and urine each day; the Hilardes dairy would generate as much waste as the residents of nearby Bakersfield, population 280,000.
“[But] there is no waste treatment center at the dairy,” said Brent Newell of the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, which plans to sue over the approval. “The waste is stored in dirt holes in the ground.”
California’s agriculture industry has won controversial exemptions from the US Clean Air Act statewide and from state environmental review in most counties; dairies are subject only to sporadic monitoring by regional water districts.
But by 2005, according to the San Joaquin Air District, livestock waste will be the valley’s largest source of volatile organic compounds (VOC), which produce ozone, a smog precursor.
Dairy industry officials dispute the report, saying it’s impossible to adequately measure the VOCs.

Drilling the Wilderness

Gabe Friedman — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:46:26 +0000

Los Padres National Forest officials are set to decide by January whether to allow oil and gas drilling in roadless areas targeted for protection in US Senator Barbara Boxer’s wilderness bill.
“It’s a race to the finish,” said the California Wilderness Coalition’s Keith Hammond, noting that any approved drilling leases would preempt protection by Boxer’s SB 2535. “There’s a very real risk they will finish this leasing plan before we can pass the wilderness bill.” The bill, with no vote date set, would protect 2.5 million acres statewide, including more than 300,000 in the Los Padres forest along California’s south-central coast.
But on 100,000 of these acres — wilderness home to 20 imperiled species, including the California condor — Forest Service officials would allow extraction of at least 17 million barrels of oil (or the gas equivalent).
State and federal regulators have also permitted exploratory projects, completed in September, for gas drilling on more than 16,000 acres of Central Valley grasslands and wetlands in the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge and the state’s Los Banos and Volta refuges. The area hosts 47 federally designated threatened or endangered plants and animals, including the kit fox and the golden eagle.
No environmental groups have organized to oppose the exploration.

Hope for Renewables

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:46:25 +0000

A groundbreaking California law requires all investor-owned utilities to increase their renewable energy use by 1% per year, eventually to 20%.
The Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, signed in September, “dwarfs anything any [other state] has done,” said Nancy Rader of the California Wind Energy Association.
But there’s a catch. The Public Utility Commission and the California Energy Commission will set a “benchmark price” for energy, primarily natural gas, which utilities must pay for 10 years. That figure, to be set as early as June 2003, could make or break the program.
If bids for renewable energy come in higher than the benchmark, the difference will be subsidized by the Public Goods Charge, $135 million per year from an existing surcharge on Californians’ energy bills. But if that fund runs out, the law is waived until the following year. If renewable energy comes in lower than the price for gas and other nonrenewables, the fund would last longer, allowing enough investment to meet the 20% goal.
The good news for renewable-energy proponents is that the benchmark is supposed to account for the full cost of natural gas energy, including expensive construction already paid for. Renewable-energy plants, which could run on free, stable fuel like sun and wind, could compete better under this formula.
“Renewable” excludes new hydroelectric contracts but does allow geothermal — by far the state’s largest “renewable” source [see p.15].

PG&E’s “Jailbreak”

J.A. Savage — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:45:24 +0000

A little-noticed federal court ruling could mean that companies declaring bankruptcy can waive all state laws governing water quality, safety, or land use.
According to the August 30 ruling in Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)’s case, bankrupt companies can sell off publicly important assets like forest lands and nuclear power plants with essentially only one interest in mind — the company’s creditors.
“It would make bankruptcy court a haven for environmental scofflaws,” said attorney Karl Fingerhood, who represents the US Environmental Protection Agency.
PG&E’s bankruptcy plans include spinning off the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, along with its vast network of hydroelectric dams and adjacent forest lands, to a limited liability company. If a federal court approves the plans — a decision is expected as early as 2003 — those assets would be regulated only by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which traditionally do not hold utilities to high environmental standards.
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which calls the ruling “a regulatory jailbreak” and has submitted its own proposals to keep a reorganized PG&E under state control, has appealed the US District Court decision.