In Mono County "more than 90 percent of the land is owned by conservation-minded government agencies: the U.S. Forest Service, the federal Bureau of Land Management and, most controversially, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power."
Public open land is usually not developed for a reason. Read the legal definition of Open Space. Most importantly, Open Space has value for ecosystem services (that may indirectly help humans).
Open space for the preservation of natural resources including, but not limited to, areas required for the preservation of plant and animal life, including habitat for fish and wildlife species; areas required for ecologic and other scientific study purposes; rivers, streams, bays and estuaries; and coastal beaches, lakeshores, banks of rivers and streams, and watershed lands.
One of the reasons for acquiring US Forest Service lands is to protect watersheds for downstream users (farmers and urban users). If you don't see any buildings or roads on it, the land is working as intended. I don't want to get into a debate about whether it is appropriate to divert water from the Eastern Sierras for the City of Los Angeles. But, if this is the headwaters for a water supply (one of many) for 4 Million people, it is correct to protect the upper watershed from housing development & the roads necessary to service the housing. The USFS lands protect watersheds for other downstream users, including wildlife and farmers.
Mono County is over 2 million acres, 94% of which is publicly-owned. This leaves 120,000 acres of privately-owned land that could potentially be used for housing. About 7,500 people reside in the Mammoth Lakes region and another 35,000 visit annually. You can easily find enough space to house workers if you build densely enough in already-developed areas. The only thing preventing you is imagination and bad zoning. (You will also have to do some infrastructure work, but it will be much less than if you continued the sprawl development pattern.)
The population density of Mono County is 4 people per square mile. Even if you add in visitors (vacation home owners), the density is still < 20 ppl/sq mi. In contrast, my census tract in suburban Los Angeles County has 18,000/sq mi. If you use only the 6% of private land, that's still only ~500 ppl/sq mi. I know that some of the land is not suitable for housing, but there is still lots of room to build infill housing if the local government were to allow it.
Not allowing denser housing in town, near the jobs, is causing the homelessness euphemistically called "Van Life". Small towns can build social workforce housing so that workers won't have to compete with vacation home buyers. Salida, CO is doing that. They are building UP--allowing mixed use housing above downtown commercial space. They purchased land downtown to build a 100% affordable workforce housing project. Why don't the Mono and Inyo county towns do something similar? Infill workforce housing of < 100 units is exempt from CEQA (Class 32).
I was incredulous when I learned that the communities did not have public bathrooms and showers. It would not take that much space and $ to build public bathrooms and showers. Colorado mountain towns often have laundromats that sell showers. (So refreshing after a backpacking trip.) Why don't the CA towns build their own public showers or partner with a laundromat to add showers?
Don't whine about others so you can perpetuate sprawl. Make bathrooms and showers available in the short term. Upzone the small towns and keep everything compact, affordable and sustainable.
I've given a talk in December 2022 and am scheduled to talk again in January and February 2023 to groups comprised mainly of older homeowners concerned about lack of transit and wheelchair-accessible housing in their communities. Most are unaware that those are connected.
The High Quality Transit Areas (HQTAs) is within one half-mile of a well-serviced transit stop or a transit corridor with 15-minute or less service frequency during peak commute hours.
Founded in 1965, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is a Joint Powers Authority under California state law, established as an association of local governments and agencies that voluntarily convene as a forum to address regional issues. Under federal law, SCAG is designated as a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) and under state law as a Regional Transportation Planning Agency and a Council of Governments.
The SCAG region encompasses six counties (Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura) and 191 cities in an area covering more than 38,000 square miles. The agency develops long-range regional transportation plans including sustainable communities strategy and growth forecast components, regional transportation improvement programs, regional housing needs allocations and a portion of the South Coast Air Quality management plans
Seniors want to stay in their own homes, or at least in their own communities. And they want frequent transit to serve them. They've looked around and are deeply unhappy with what they have found. Why can't we have frequent and good transit like other places they have vacationed at?
Why doesn't the South Bay have good transit? We're visibly a transit hole. High quality, frequent transit does not touch most of the residential areas of the Beach Cities, El Segundo, Torrance and Palos Verdes Cities.
Is it because wealthy people can afford cars and don't need transit? Nope, not if you compare to Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena and Beverly Hills.
When we purchased our home in the late 1990s, we researched bus lines, bike commutes and USGS geologic maps. We really liked that the Torrance 8 bus ran between our home, daycare, workplace at 30 minute frequency throughout the day and even more often during peak commute hours. Those buses were well-used by people who worked in El Segundo and lived along the route in Torrance, North Redondo Beach and Hawthorne.
Over time, the service degraded noticeably and wasn't reliable any more. That's the main reason why I ride my eBike during the day and drive at night. Transit isn't viable for me any more, even if I want to take a bus to dinner and then walk home (burn off dessert) or catch a ride home with my dinner companions. Even during peak hours, the buses are infrequent and often get canceled at the last minute.
Moreover, the southern terminus of the route used to be at Newton St and Hawthorne Blvd, a short walk from hundreds of homes. Now the route has been shortened to end at the intersection of two state highways, Pacific Coast Highway (CA1) and Hawthorne Boulevard (CA107). To reach the stop, people have to walk farther from their homes and cross wide highways with 7-9 lanes of deafening traffic.
When I regularly took the bus, they were well-utilized. Most seats were occupied at peak hours. Even after peak, about half the seats were taken by people out shopping or going to their retail/service jobs.
Buses operate at a loss. That's why we pay taxes to subsidize them. But roads and parking lots also operate a loss and we never question whether or not they are necessary. Fuel and registration fees cover only about half the costs of roads; the rest comes from general funds.
The cost of "free parking" is borne by customers or tax payers, including those that didn't drive there. The subsidy is flowing towards drivers, not bike riders. In fact, pedestrians receive the lowest subsidy, then bike riders (cost of bike racks), then transit riders, then drivers.
But I digress. Let's get back to poor bus service. The seniors I talk to all want frequent buses that run near their homes. They would prefer the buses to run past their existing homes, but are willing to move to a condo or apartment complex within their communities if that is the only way they will get high-quality transit.
Sounds good. Let's pick some areas to serve intensively with transit, and then build lots of homes there. The more transit riders there are, the better service we can maintain; it's a virtuous cycle that serves seniors aging out of driving well.
Not so fast, building housing is politically toxic throughout the southland. Today's seniors have elected (for decades) local leaders running on platforms of preserving the "neighborhood character" of their "unique community", and fighting "overbuilding" and "Sacramento overreach".
Elected leaders are suing the state of California about whether they should be exempt from state housing law (like the Housing Accountability Act) and questioning both the legality and the numbers in the Regional Housing Needs Allocation.
The State of California's Department of Housing and Community Development (the CA analog of the Federal Government's HUD), tells each regional planning authority how many homes their region needs to build to provide for existing and future residents. Each region decides for themselves how they want to allocate those homes based on their goals and values.
The formula is a product of our professed values. We claim to value opportunity, so we assign more housing near where the jobs are. We claim to value clean air and want to lower Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, so we place homes in HQTAs. We claim we want to address inequality, so we assign more low income housing to places that traditionally have not provided lower income residents.
Conversely, it assigns more higher income housing in poorer communities that can benefit from the tax base provided by higher earners. It's not forced gentrification or ghettofication. It's just trying to level the playing field to help everyone succeed. The goal is to work together with neighbors to solve regional problems like pollution, congestion, and the housing crisis.
Just select your city of interest in cell D5. Here's Torrance, the city that runs Torrance Transit and presided over its demise. Torrance is big mad at their 6th Cycle RHNA "quota" of 4,939 homes over the next ~8 year RHNA cycle. They have never been given such a high allocation before. Their 5th Cycle allocation was 1,450, and they didn't even meet that.
I paired Torrance with their neighbor, Gardena; and Redondo Beach with neighboring Lawndale. Notice how the smaller cities are given higher RHNA allocations than their larger and more affluent neighbors. They are assigned 2-3x as many homes per capita.
Is it because of job access? Look at the SCAG GIS map of Job Centers. Torrance is smack dab in the middle of one of the largest job centers in Southern California, with ~129,000 jobs.
Both loudly-complaining cities, Torrance and Redondo Beach, have more jobs and easier access to jobs than Gardena and Lawndale, hence they were assigned more homes in the Jobs column.
What explains the big differences then?
Go back and look at the HQTA map. It's all based on existing population in the HQTAs within each jurisdiction.
The more people already living inside the existing HQTAs used in the planning formula, the higher their HQTA-based RHNA allocations. Most cities like jobs (with the possible exception of pre-pandemic San Francisco) so they don't play as many games with that.
Cities know that the way to finesse lower RHNA housing allocations is to minimize the areal coverage of HQTAs in your city, and then to minimize the number of people who live in the HQTAs.
This is how El Segundo, home to LAX and the 121,000 jobs in the LAX job center,
and with 3 light rail stations inside of their cities and one just over the border at LAX, got allocated just 1 home due to HQTA. Yes, just 1 home!
When El Segundo fought to avoid permitting homes east of PCH, this is the subtext. They gave up land to Hawthorne to avoid having homes in their jurisdiction near a rail station.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but South Bay seniors who want to live in wheelchair accessible home with viable public transit will have to move away. Transit sucks now and will not be added back if it will expand HQTA coverage area. No new homes will be built in HQTAs if local officials can stop it.
(This is also why California enacted laws to preempt local officials to force them to permit home building in HQTAs.)
It's all connected to the decisions made by the people we elected and the incentives they operate under. When they talk about preserving the "neighborhood character" of your "unique community", and fighting "overbuilding" and "Sacramento overreach", they collect donations and win elections.
They don't tell you that they will never allow expansion of HQTAs within their jurisdictions if they can help it. This is a large part of the subtext of the fight over Metro C line extension routing. Your elected officials are fighting to ensure you don't get access to rail transit (which is harder to cancel/decrease than bus lines) so that they won't have to build housing.
They don't even want to build in existing HQTAs lest it expose them to higher RHNA allocations in future cycles. So instead, they talk about shadows and view sheds, impose high parking minimums. These all serve to reduce the number of homes that can be built and the number of people in the homes.
They don't tell you that the kind of low-density zoning they are protecting will only every yield townhomes with stairs, built on top of car garages. Low density zoning and height limits makes building accessible apartments with elevators prohibitively expensive to build. They hope developments don't "pencil out" (can't be built profitably), so that the developers go away.
What homes do get produced will be very expensive because they have to cover the parking and land. If you can build 2 stories of housing over 1 story of parking, they have to charge a lot more than if they built 4 stories of housing over the same parking structure on the same land. To maximize affordability, they could even stop requiring parking since seniors and the disabled are much less likely to drive or own cars anyway. Parking is another proxy war to suppress housing.
If you want to solve a problem. then you solve the problem. You don't spend decades screaming the problem doesn't exist. You don't enact ordinances that make the problem even worse. You don't sue people who point out that the problem exists. You don't defund researchers who collect data and evidence on the problem.
This applies to climate change and our regional housing crisis.
Enough, tonight. I just want to point out that it's all related.
Enjoy the Metro C Line (Green) Extension to Torrance Project Simulation Video. Think about how you want to live as you or your parents age out of driving. Think about where you want your children and grandchildren to live as the planet gets hotter and hotter. Do you want them on the cooler coast with you? Then make room for them.
I know that I will fight for a light rail route that is closer to my home. And I will also fight for a 7th Cycle RHNA allocation that can't be gamed by climate arsonists.
Even if we get a higher RHNA allocation based on light rail routing, California law gives us local control about where we place that home growth. We can and should spread it out, particularly as our area ages. The medical industry jobs in Torrance keep growing, and South Redondo Beach is very close to those jobs.
Aside:
Coastal Los Angeles Communities are facing a Silver Tsunami of aging residents and a dearth of younger families. Housing is so expensive, our children move far away. (A few may live with us.) The SCAG RHNA formula projects future housing needs based on demographics of existing residents. If you have few current residents of child-bearing age, then you won't have many births or future residents to house.
Since we have moved homes affordable for young, families so far into the inland deserts, they were assigned higher RHNA allocations than older communities along the coast. I included the data for Coachella in my comparison table.
Coachella has 14,277 Households in 2020, while Culver City has 17,146. Yet, Household Growth in Coachella is projected to be 5,794 while Culver City's is only 296. That's a 20-fold difference!
If you push young people out of your city, you will be assigned lower RHNA numbers. But then, who will help you change your senior diapers? How often will you see your children and grandchildren?
Anyway, stop fixating on "winning" a game of foisting housing elsewhere. Plan for a better future for yourself by planning for a more inclusive future in your community.
Neighborhood Defenders bring up aesthetics, the environment and property values as reasons to oppose things. There are quite a few in my city (and likely yours, too). Sometimes, it seems like nothing must ever change or else we will incur their wrath. I've been begging for bike lanes for 25 years, to no avail. Bike lanes must never take away on-street parking (mostly FREE PARKING) so they don't get built. Instead, we'll just keep making blood sacrifices of our children on the streets.
Anyway, I digress. This is a blog post about electricity and pollution. But I have to digress a little bit longer first.
Since 2019, I have been a director on the boards of both League of Women Voters of the Beach Cities and of Los Angeles County. Due to my science background, I was assigned the Natural Resources Portfolio.
I've been passionate about water and the environment since I took Field Biology in high school. So I also joined the LWVC Water Committee. I was a little bit too outspoken at the Water Committee meetings because I ended up being assigned to write nearly half the Overview of California Water articles, including the one on the Water-Energy Nexus.
This led the LWVC chair of Natural Resources to ask me to serve as her deputy in the area of Energy/Electricity. Thus, I found myself the Energy Subcommittee team leader. I promptly ordered and read a bunch of books about energy and clean energy in particular. It's a fascinating topic. I never imagined that I would know the names and boundaries of the regional balancing authorities of The Grid, or that I would have opinions on their governance. But, I do now. ;-)
Back to electricity.
There's been a spate of articles lately about the fate of a handful of power plants along the California coast that use ocean water for cooling. OTC (Once Through Cooling) plants have to suck in large volumes of ocean or river water, which can suck in small sea/aquatic life. That is totally no bueno.
At one time, we had quite a few of them. They sit on prime ocean-front land so their real value is often more due to real estate than power production. OTOH, they also have infrastructure, such as existing transmission lines, that would be difficult to assemble today.
So I started researching the fate of the OTC plants that are no longer using ocean water for cooling. It turns out that I didn't have to look far. In 2013-2014, a similar power plant just a few miles to the north, the El Segundo Energy Center, was repowered* from Boiler-type OTC to a dry-cooled Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT).
* Repowering means updating an older power plant with newer equipment that is more efficient and pollutes less. Switching from a gas boiler system to CCGT yields 50-70% more energy per amount of gas burned or per molecule of CO2 produced. They can be powered up in 20-30 minutes compared to many hours for older boiler plants.
Newer Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engines (RICE) can be powered up in 2 minutes, meaning they can react quickly to things like the marine layer moving in and decreasing local roof-top solar power output. RICE are air-cooled, yielding substantial water savings of millions of gallons per day.
You know how much I love data. I discovered the EPA Clean Air Markets Program Data Portal (aka Cap and Trade). I looked up the characteristics and 2021 data for five area power plants, including the repowered one in El Segundo and AES Redondo Beach.
The comparison is stark! On every pollution metric, AES RB is much, much worse than ESEC--about 2-3.5x as much pollution per unit of power, over the course of a year, and it operates 4x as many hours.
I summed up the data from Jan 1, 2021 to Dec 31, 2021 to get an idea of how much power and pollution each plant puts out in a year.
Each Facility/Power Plant has more than one generator. They turn on the amount they need to meet the anticipated electricity demand/load. No one wants to burn more fuel than they need to because that's just burning money.
El Segundo has 2 generators, Redondo Beach has 3. Operating time is summed up over generators. If all 3 are running for one hour, that's 3 hours of operating time.
Gross load is how much power they are making.
Despite providing comparable amounts of power over the course of a year, the older AES RB plant puts out 2x the SO2 and CO2 and 3.5x the NOx than the AES plant. It also operates over more hours. (Click on the table to enlarge it.)
I made histograms for hours of the day that each plant ran. Redondo Beach, which has the older boilers, has to run pretty much continuously to keep warm so that they can deliver electricity during the peak demand hours on hot summer evenings. Incredibly wasteful and polluting.
El Segundo EC can ramp up and ramp down each day that it runs. Notice the vertical axes on AES RB are 2x higher. ESEC has 2 generators, running an average of 50 days a year, mainly during the late afternoon and evening hours. It shuts down at other hours because it can. Saves money, saves CO2/SO2/NOx. It's just better all around.
I made a scatterplot of power output by each hour of operation. Redondo Beach operates a lot of hours with low power output. (This is summed up over all generators. Sometimes, 2-3 generators are working at the same time.)
El Segundo rarely operates both generators at the same time. It also runs some warm up hours with little power output, but uses a lot less gas to do it at those times (if you look at the full data).
Nameplate capacity is how much power a plant can generate, if it ran at full tilt. ESEC has a nameplate capacity of 560 MW with both generators operating. They ran one for part of 538 hours and the other for 626 hours. There are 8760 hours/year. If it ran at full capacity the entire year, it would generate 4,905,600 MWh of energy. It generated 227,487 MWh in 2021, so it ran at .046 capacity factor in 2021. ESEC is an example of a "peaker" plant, that runs only when the grid demand is high.
AES RB is another peaker plant. Nameplate capacity is 496 MW so annual capacity is 4,344,960 MWh. It generated 251,192 MWh for .058 capacity factor.
There are activists who want to block all fossil fuel investments. That's seductive because why would people spend money on something that they are going to idle most of the time? If we have it, we will use it. Right?
Induced demand has been shown to apply to car traffic. When you add a lane (like we did to the 405 freeway), then more people drive until the congestion is just as bad or even worse than before. If there is parking at a destination, people tend to drive. If there isn't, they tend to find another way to get there (e.g. transit for DTLA or bikes for the beach).
The converse is also true. When you make driving a hassle, people do it less. If people don't have cars, they make fewer trips. If they are thinking of driving somewhere, and that place doesn't have parking, they may forgo the trip rather than deal with the hassle.
So, if you have a car, how often do you use it? The answer is ~5% of the time, about the same percentage of time as a peaker power plant!
Does induced demand work for natural gas power plants? Do operators have the self control to build new, highly efficient and clean ones, and then let them sit idle most of the time? ESEC spent $ rebuilding the power plant, but they run it profitably by only running it during the hours when power buyers are paying the highest prices. They also installed advanced emissions controls. Under cap and trade rules, they can sell emissions credits to other operators.
AES Alamitos and Huntington Beach are much bigger plants and serve "baseload" instead of running only at peak demand times. AES proposed another peaker plant in Redondo Beach. The question becomes, do you think that AES will adhere to the plan they submitted?
CAISO (California Independent System Operator) runs the CA Grid and has the authority to tell power plants when to operate, when to curtail/go offline. Do you think that CAISO, the Coastal Commission and the CPUC (CA Public Utilities Commission) would allow AES RB to deviate from their plan/permits? Would they all be in on the same conspiracy? I trust not, but I know that many of the voices that carried the day did not feel the same.
Here's something in a report from San Diego Gas & Electric. See how the generation capacity of gas power plants remains high, but the amount of electricity produced from them ramps down over time? That's due to California's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RE PS). Power producers are required to serve more Renewable Energy over time. Even if they are tempted to run their gas plants more to recoup their investment, they really can't.
In the future, with high integration of renewable energy sources, all gas plants will operate as peaker plants. If they can't be nimble enough, they will be retired. It's the most rational and economic choice. It's also the only way they will meet California's RE PS which is the law of the land.
However, if they don't make the investment in modern facilities that can ramp up and down in minutes, the old technology requires them to run many more hours than needed, burning more gas and generating more pollution along the way.
These old plants are so, so bad. They aren't responsive enough to serve the needs of today's grid with high renewables content. They are wasteful of money and fuels. They generate high amounts of pollution per unit of energy. They require water in a water-scarce region. The OTC plants are even worse because of their ocean water intakes.
So why wasn't AES Redondo Beach repowered? AES tried. But there was so much opposition from Redondo Beach leaders, they gave up. RB Patch covered it pretty thoroughly and doesn't have a paywall.
AES officials say the new plant will run more efficiently, have a smaller footprint and provide flexibility for the grid when energy from renewable resources isn't available.
Opponents, on the other hand, argue that the plant will continue to decrease property values and blight the waterfront, despite a $300 million revitalization effort. Additionally, they point to AES' application and say a new plant will run more often than the current one, and thus produce five to 15 times more particulate pollution.
Anyway, for almost a decade, Redondans have suffered 2-3.5x more pollution than we would have if AES RB had been repowered to the same scale and technology as ESEC. We lived with more noise as the proposed upgrade would have been enclosed to contain sound and ran much fewer hours/days. We also continued sucking marine life into the water intakes.
All for what? To say we won? To say that we stopped AES? To cost AES money?
It certainly didn't help the marine life or reduce CO2/SO2/NOx emissions.
It didn't have to be this way.
(I'll write about Grayson another day as it's past my bedtime.)
This video came across my Twitter timeline and I retweeted it. Rice geophysics professor Cin-Ty Lee explains why nickel and cobalt laterites are found in the areas where biodiversity is greatest. It's pretty heartbreaking.
I knew that batteries were very toxic, and that the Cobalt used in them came from DRC*, often using slave or child labor, but I had believed the stories that alternate sources of Cobalt had been found and that would be a nonissue as soon as the alternate sources came online.
Professor Lee's video made me realize that the most economically viable Cobalt deposits are all in the tropics: Congo, Papua New Guinea and Queensland, Australia. You reach the deposits either by strip mining in tropical highlands, or mining the oceans.
If you are in the "green-industrial complex" and need to calculate your client's carbon footprint, you end up having to sum the carbon from battery production with the savings that the battery enables. If battery production includes the carbon released from strip mining tropical rainforests to mine the ore, the potential carbon savings plummets.
I found an open access journal about the Life cycle assessment of cobalt extraction process that gave a picture of the tradeoffs. Eutrophication means adding nitrogen and silt to waterways from the strip mining.
Highlights
The life cycle assessment of the cobalt extraction route is carried out.
Blasting and electricity consumption in cobalt mining is damaging to the environment.
Eutrophication and global warming are the most affected impact categories.
Carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emission are highest from cobalt mining.
Alternative energy sources for electricity generation would enhance sustainability.
One way to avoid destroying tropical rainforests to mine ore is to source your ore from the ocean floor. I found other articles such as, Deep-ocean polymetallic nodules as a resource for critical materials, that show the potential of deep ocean mining metals used in batteries. You may not release carbon by cutting down tropical rainforests, but you will make the fishing and tourism industries and coral reef ecologists very angry. You'll also destroy ocean ecology. Pesky tradeoffs!
Right now, we're in the battery build up phase. Eventually, we'll have enough that we can keep recycling them, much as we do for lead-acid batteries. This will end the destruction caused by mining, but cause other problems.
I did a little research to wrap my head around how much we are talking about.
Lithium-metal batteries are about 10-20% cobalt chemistry, but that includes water, so it's about 1-2% Cobalt by weight.
Teslas have 1060-1200 pounds of batteries or about 55-85 kWh (kiloWatt hours)
The new eHummer has 200 kWh
My Ebike has 0.5 kWh
My Escooter has 0.3 kWh**
Electric cars have 100-500x the batteries and toxicity of Ebikes/Etrikes/Escooters. They are also very very spatially inefficient with road space and urban space (parking). For rural areas where space is not a problem and distances are large, they make sense. For the 90+% of Californians and Angelenos living in urban spaces, they are a last solution, not a first solution.
I Ebike about 50 miles on the charge used to move a Tesla X just 1 mile. Do we really need to move a 4000# car with an additional 1000# of batteries to move one person plus groceries? I can carry 5 days worth of groceries for 3 on my Ebike without a backpack. I could probably carry 7 days worth with a backpack, but why bother?
This is why I don't support strongly support electric cars, trucks and buses alone.
We have to get out of single occupancy cars as much as possible, especially in the urbanized areas.
We need to decarbonize transportation using every tool, starting with right-sizing the vehicles for the task.
We need to use road space more efficiently, which means remodeling our urban environments to make better use of transit and active modes (walking/cycling).
** A research paper showed the CO2 per passenger-mile for a bunch of different transport modes and the statistic that caught all the media editors' clickbait attention was that shared electric scooters are inefficient. They are inefficient due to their short lifespans (people trash them) and miles driven in cars by the people who hunt them down, recharge them and restock them.
A subsequent study showed that privately-owned Escooters are almost as efficient as Ebikes, which are almost as efficient as regular bikes-the most efficient mode of travel ever invented.
I had a really good conversation with my daughter about nuclear power this week. We've been having a lot of conversations about infrastructure and the environment during the voting period while she filled out her ballot.
[I'm so proud of her doing the research and voting the whole ballot. At her age, I left some of them blank, especially the down ticket races & obscure government boards, thinking that others were more qualified to decide. We all know how that worked out.]
Anyway, I wanted to document our discussion in case your kid asks, too.
The federal Energy Information Administration is a font of information. Hooray for deep state operatives that collate, quality check and make good information available!
The US generated about 4118 Billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2019. It's impossible to know how much electricity is generated by privately-owned solar panels "behind the meter", but EIA estimates there's an additional 35 Billion kWh. It's a drop in the bucket, but growing.
The largest chunk of carbon-free electricity in the US is from nuclear, 19.7%. That's slightly larger than the 17.5% generated by renewables.
If we were all to magically replace our gasoline powered cars with electric ones, we'd need to double our electricity generation. If we were to close down all the existing nuclear power plants, we'd have to figure out a way to add carbon free electricity at an unprecedented and extremely difficult rate. If we were to do both, as some people want, I don't know how we will keep the lights on.
Moreover, large hydropower and existing nuclear power plants in the US were all built 40-90 years ago. 25% of our nations' electricity generation capacity is at the end of their design lifetime and need to be replaced along with the 23.5% that comes from coal.
The US doesn't produce solar panels any more. (It's dirty and dangerous to produce. It's expensive to produce safely.) We rely on Chinese imports. The Chinese government just announced an aggressive schedule to decarbonize their electricity generation, which may mean exporting less panels to the US.
NIMBYs have stymied wind mill deployment around the country.
California Governor Newsom announced an executive order that all cars sold in California from 2035 and later have to be electric. That's 15 years from now and our electricity grid is neither ready or on the way to being ready in time.
We are in serious trouble unless we dramatically reduce the number of cars we drive, the number of miles that we drive and the size/weight of the vehicles. This is why I'm such a shill for Ebikes.
In California, I spend a lot of time on the California Independent System Operator site viewing daily electricity data*. Consider August 16, 2020. It was a particularly hot day.
Due to a combination of factors, there was insufficient electricity and California experienced rolling blackouts in the late afternoon and evening to keep the grid from crashing over wider areas. Here's CAISO data for energy sources for that day.
I replotted the data to put the "Green" energy on the bottom and the most carbon-intensive sources at the top. EIA reported that roughly half the electricity imports to CA in 2019 were carbon-free. I have no idea what other means so I left it at the top.
Here's a detail of the renewables portion:
When the sun goes down, renewable energy plummets while energy demand rapidly rises. This leads to the infamous CA duck curve.
Filling this need with batteries would take an insane amount of highly toxic and dangerous batteries. There aren't enough rare earth minerals to make it happen, anyway.
You could fill the need, in an emergency, by releasing water from dams during the evening to generate hydropower. But, rivers and streams don't exist solely to be our batteries. Rivers support whole ecosystems that rely on the cooling power of water flow during the hot afternoons. This mimics the natural rhythm of snowpack melt, stream flow in Sierras. Moreover, you can't count on having water to release in drought years.
This gets us back to where we started. On an annual basis, CA gets about 8-10% of our electricity from Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. Before the closure of San Onofre, nuclear used to provide ~20% of CA's electricity. San Onofre and the geothermal power plants near the CA-MX border used to provide SoCal with nearly entirely carbon-free electricity at night.
So we talked about how and where Cobalt is mined; nuclear, battery and coal waste problems, tradeoffs of different sources of electricity, and environmental justice.
It made me feel like I was doing my job as a mom.
* I was the type of teenager that got insider (not public) tours of Diablo Canyon and Forsmark nuclear power plants. People knew that I was interested in science and energy/water, and I also finagled my way into places. That wouldn't happen today.
I wanted to do a quick post about something that seems like a small tweak and highly local, but that is much more complicated and far-reaching. It gives another data point for "all politics is local" and "think globally, act locally."
The notices went out to residents, but not the gardeners. Renters, about half the RB population, don't hire gardeners. I don't know if property managers that hire gardeners were notified. The gardeners seemed to be unaware of the rule.
When I told gardeners about the rule, they ignored me or told me either that they were unaware of the ban, or that their electric leaf blowers were exempt.
BTW, the smog pollution includes NO2, which is known to be a very potent and persistent greenhouse gas.
1 hour of lawn mower use produces as much smog as driving LA to Vegas. 1 hour of leaf blower use = driving 1100 miles from LA to Denver.
The numbers are staggering. 1 hour of leaf blower use produces as much smog as a RT to visit my mom in SF and continuing on to northern NorCal to visit my SIL. 2 hours = a RT to Boulder to visit friends.
Newer cars are much cleaner than older cars. Our hybrid is cleaner than average so the equivalent SORE use time may be much lower. In 2020, SORE smog emissions will roughly equal total car smog emissions in CA. SORE emissions will dominate as older, more polluting cars are retired.
Lawn Equipment roughly equal total car smog emissions in CA and will dominate as the old cars are retired.
The case against gas-powered leaf blowers is easy and well-known. What about the much quieter electric-powered leaf blowers? Are they a harmless alternative?
They don't produce the smog, but they are just as effective at kicking up clouds of dust. Gardeners wear particle masks when they use leaf blowers to protect themselves, but the rest of us choke in it.
What's in that dust?
Pollen: terrible for allergy sufferers
Mold: terrible for people with allergies and compromised immune systems*
Road Dust: toxic, carcinogenic, causes lung & heart disease and dementia, makes Covid-19 deadlier
Let's normalize using a rake with a broom and dust pan. It doesn't kick up as much dust or throw it up as high. Reject that ultra-manicured yard look.
* My stepmother died of pneumonia after her last round of chemotherapy. She was given a strong cocktail of antibiotics and anti-fungals via IV, but they couldn't save her. An autopsy showed that she died of fungal pneumonia. Mold spores got into her lungs and took advantage of her weakened state. I think of her every time I hear or see a leaf blower.
Leaf blowers are another reason I lost faith in my local government. I thought that you pass a law, and people obey the law. If they don't, you call the cops or some other watchdog responsible for enforcing the law.
I called the non-emergency police hotline. They took the report, but did nothing. I asked my council member. They said that the police were not happy about working without a contract. Hopefully, they would do more enforcement of laws after contract negotiations were successful.
[The city was also spinning up another number and email address where we could report leaf blower violations as a workaround for the non responsive police department. I emailed that office time-stamped photos of leaf blower use on my block, but never got any responses from them either.]
WHUT? Local teachers were working YEARS without a contract, yet they were still doing their jobs.
From the Beach Reporter
In the 14 months since Redondo Beach enacted a ban on leaf blowers, the city has received more than 1,700 complaints and issued just three citations.
...
On Tuesday, the Redondo Beach City Council received its answer when it learned that out of more than 1,375 leaf blower complaints to city code enforcement just two citations were issued. Police issued one citation out of 339 complaints. Numerous courtesy notices were also issued.
Up to that point, I had very few interactions with the RB police. Now, with all the BLM and Defund the Police talk, I've been thinking about what functions are appropriate for the police and which would be more effectively dealt with by others.
Have you looked at your city's budget? I mean really looked at both the discretionary budget and the zombie costs of pensions? Do you know about the VERY generous police pensions relative to all other types of government jobs? They literally have a gun pointed at our heads during contract negotiations.
Anyway, this has changed the way I see the police and city budgets. It's also changed the way I see local political races and endorsements from police (and fire) unions. The saga with the RB firemans' union going after the elected officials that refused to merge with the county fire department (and their platinum-plated pension program) was eye-opening.
Even after cutting $150 M, LAPD still gets more than half the city's unrestricted funds. If you count pension contributions, and they have the most generous pensions, police departments get the lions share of most city budgets.
The cities work for the police departments, not the other way around.
Moreover, these employees often don't live in the cities where they serve. They take that money and spend it elsewhere. It's not an exaggeration to call it colonialism.
It started with my allergies and leaf blowers. But it made this suburban mom question who really works for whom. My local police union** taught me a lesson, and it wasn't the one they intended. When the Defund the Police movement arrived, I was ready to listen.
**The police union and the police chief are not equivalent. They don't have the same priorities.
When do elections meet international standards of electoral integrity?
What happens when elections fail to do so?
And what can be done to mitigate these problems?
Under the direction of Professor Pippa Norris and the distinguished International Advisory Board, the Electoral Integrity Project produces innovative and policy-relevant research comparing elections worldwide. The research team is based at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Was it a fair election? The answer is more than a simple yes or no. Election integrity is more of a continuum.
Elections are just one of the pillars of democracy. Another pillar is an informed electorate. I blog about topics that I don't see in the press, or that I don't feel were treated with adequate nuance. So, in a sense, my blog is an affirmation of my optimism for democracy. If more people knew the facts, they could react more optimally to ensure better outcomes for everyone.
It's fair to say, this has been wildly optimistic. Nevertheless, I persist. Suppose you have never voted before, or are trying to convince friends and family to become voters, where do you get started?
[Substitute your jurisdictions to search for the official sites.]
In Los Angeles County, the county clerk coordinates the ballots and voting for all 88 cities in the county. It's a huge undertaking as LA Co is both the most populous (10 Million) and the most complex (language diversity) county in the US.
Mandated Languages
Los Angeles County is currently required to provide the following language assistance to VRA voters in addition to English:
The full list of LA County Vote Centers just went live on 10/1/2020. Some are open 5 days (10/30-11/03) and others are open 11 days (10/24-11/03.) The list of over 400 secure Ballot Drop Box locations will be released shortly. If you are a registered voter in CA, your ballot will be mailed to you. You can mail it back, or drop it off at a Ballot Drop Box or Vote Center.
When I was eligible to vote for the first time, I was an 18 year old college freshman. I only knew what my teachers and parents told me, and some of what they said were contradictory. My fellow students pretended to know the answers, but their information was also suspect.
Various groups were after my vote and bombarded our dorm mail room with pamphlets. I read and tossed all but one. The League of Women Voters (whom I had never heard of up to that point) left a brochure that explained each initiative (and CA has a lot of them) in plain English and then listed the Pros and Cons of each of them.
The LWV wasn't after my vote. They wanted to educate me. I've used their brochures ever since. Printing brochures is expensive, so most of it is online. I'm providing links and explaining the differences between the different sites.
[Aside: Non-partisan means LWV does not endorse or oppose any particular political party or candidate. LWV also works really hard not to be biased. LWVC is a registered 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), which means it does education AND advocacy and I'll get to the advocacy part below.]
You can always start at the LWV US (national) level site at lwv.org and then navigate to your particular states' site. In my case, that would be lwvc.org. Follow the links on the right column for the Voter Toolbox for instructions on the logistics of how to vote in your area. You can even Register to Vote online.
Underneath the Voters Toolbox, you will find the CA Voter's Edge widget. (In other states, go to vote411.org for your state-specific information.)
Type in your zip code (your street address is optional) and click on the green "Find my ballot" button. The site will query a database and return with every single item you are eligible to vote on in the upcoming election (Federal, State, County, City, special Districts.)
LWV volunteers in every community contact candidates running for office and send them written questionnaires and invitations to upload their bios and other informational data. (I admit to being a bit biased here, but I think that a candidate that refuses, or is too disorganized, to provide information maybe shouldn't be in public office.)
I usually take my sample ballot, sit in front of my computer, read the candidate stuff, and mark my selections on my sample ballot. In pre-Covid days, I brought my sample ballot to the Vote Center with me and entered in my selections on the touch screen. This time, I will be using copying my selections from my sample ballot to my actual ballot, which should be arriving this week in the mail.
CA Easy Voter Guide is your quick-start guide to general information about the election and plain English explanations of what each CA proposition means. Search on your state's Easy Voter Guide if you live in another state.
The Pros & Cons lay out unbiased information about each initiative.
The advocacy arm sometimes decides to take sides on initiatives (but never on candidates.)
Vote with the League provides arguments on why we hope you will side with us on some issues.
Volunteers analyze, organize, upload and sometimes write all of these materials. The decision to advocate on some initiatives is taken by a committee. (Disclaimer, I have provided research and facts for the committee to consider.) Generally, I think these are pretty good recommendations.
Occasionally, I feel more strongly on an issue that the committee stayed neutral on (or vice versa.) But, I've never had a strong disagreement, which is pretty remarkable, and why I joined the organization as a volunteer. If partisan politics isn't your thing and you want to be politically involved with a group that values facts, evidence and expertise, then check out your local LWV chapter.
Aside (written weeks ago, may repeat above info):
When I was approaching my very first election as an 18 year old UC Berkeley Freshman, I found a LWVC Pros and Cons printed pamphlet outside my dorm along with lots of flyers from myriad groups telling me to vote this way or that way. I read them all with a critical eye and the LWV stood out from the rest. Clear, evidence-based discussion of the issues and what our votes will mean.
As an immigrant, I wasn't familiar with the LWV or the other groups vying for my vote. Before the internet, you couldn't just look up the LWV history or learn how to join.
I was and am a science nerd. I did not participate in student government at any level. It didn't occur to me that LWV needs science nerds until a fellow math major invited me to a meeting. We discussed a specialized field called voting methods that involved lots of math and computer science. Everyone there was a teacher and/or a technical person and made me feel welcome.
I signed up to join both the voting methods team and the local chapter. I went to a general meeting, and found myself helping to write the next Pros and Cons and Vote with the League information for the upcoming election (on a highly technical issue that frequently gets reduced to sound bites).
Pros and Cons is purely informational and lays out all the factual arguments to support or oppose measures. Lies, distortions and wishful thinking are not tolerated. Facts, context and history with as little bias as possible given human writers and editors.
Vote with the League adds recommendations, if any. After examining all the evidence and Pros & Cons, the League may feel so strongly that it will make recommendations. Sometimes, the evidence is mixed and the League will stay neutral. If there is not enough information or the League lacks the specific policy positions to take a stand, we won't.
During tree pollen season, I often wear a surgical mask outdoors to minimize allergies. In February, I tried to restock ahead of the season. I also heard about a very bad flu virus that would make wearing a mask in crowded places prudent. Too late, I realized that, not only were the stores near me sold out, they were not going to get any more in the foreseeable future.
I read intriguing posts on the internets about homemade masks, but wasn't sure if they were nothing more than dangerous placebos.
First, she is right about the messaging. Lying to the public, even for altruistic reasons, is still counterproductive. I prefer to be treated like an adult and told that there are people who cannot stay home and need the masks more than I do.
This doesn't help me now when stores don't have anything to buy and my doctor is saving masks for her own use and for her most critically ill patients (or caregivers.) Professor Tufekci helpfully added a link to a paper about the effectiveness of different materials you can use to sew your own face masks.
I'm about to crank out some masks for my daily walks to protect me from pollen and stray human contact. I'm also making some for people I know who are essential workers and risking their lives to keep our society going.
This table is helpful, but takes a little interpretation. The first 2 columns are virus reductions over wearing no mask with surgical masks and home-made masks with a variety of materials. The third column is the pressure drop across the fabric.
That pressure drop is really important. If a mask is too hot, and you take it off, you are in danger again. So you want to find that sweet spot of comfortable to wear for hours, and good filtration. My normal go-to mask is the 3M micropore one. I can wear it comfortably for long haul flights, taking it off only to eat and drink.
Two layers of a tea towel (a thicker fabric,) is as effective as a surgical mask, but it will be as comfortable as wearing a vacuum cleaner bag.
@pdxsquared showed pictures of her home-made ear loop masks. She also shared per pattern. One commentator said that she was irresponsible for posting it--2 layers of quilting cotton isn't real protection. Well, the peer-reviewed lab-tested experiment showed that 2 layers of a pillowcase (percale, similar to quilting cotton) is 62% effective vs the 96% effectiveness of a real surgical mask, and has a similar comfort rating. You should absolutely minimize contact with other people right now. But, if you have to go out to work or get supplies or exercise, wearing DIY masks is definitely helpful.
I'm intrigued by the 75% effectiveness of "cotton mix" but can't figure out what that is. I may try some cotton/nylon/spandex shirting I was saving for a special project someday. That day is today. I'm also going to use fun quilting and shirting fabrics. Right now, I need more joy and fun.
BTW, I saw an old DIY emergency face mask pattern that suggested using 3 layers of cotton, laid at right angles. This makes sense because fabrics typically have higher thread count (and smaller holes) in one direction. Perhaps I should use cotton mix with a layer of silk scrap in the middle?
ASIDE:
If you are in a good financial place, spread the wealth.
I told our housecleaner that, because my husband continues to get paid, so will she. She cannot work from home so I'm just mailing the check to her house. Her husband is heroically driving city buses to get essential workers to their jobs--and doing it without protective equipment. I'm sending a bunch of masks to them along with the check.
We're paying students to weed our yard (while staying socially distant.) I'm making masks for them, too. I know it helps with pollen and mold.
Show me what you are making and how you are coping. We're anxious, but know that we are luckier than most. I'm in no danger of running out of fabric. ;-)
ElleC left a link in the comments on how Dr Dr Chen Xiaoting improvises surgical masks with disposable tissues or TP encased in washable/reusable cotton. https://mustsharenews.com/cloth-face-mask/
