The LA Grand Challenge Can’t Wait For Coronavirus To Be Over
By Justin Bass
April 9, 2020
Y’all heard about the Grand Challenge in Los Angeles, right? The Grand Challenge in Los Angeles to generate 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources and 100 percent of its water from local sources is taking a backseat to the immediate threat of the coronavirus (Covid-19) that has already killed close to 15,000 Americans (198 killed in LA County) and could kill approximately 100,000 Americans by the end of the year. But the threat to life and livelihood that is the fossil-fuel-caused Climate Crisis continues during the coronavirus outbreak, and corrupt handmaids of the fossil-fuel industry are making a power grab while hundreds of millions of people shelter in place. Almost immediately following stay-at-home orders for the majority of U.S. residents, on March 26, 2020 the Trump administration relaxed regulations on industries, including energy companies.
“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” said Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist and Trump’s administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.”
The Trump administration already stripped away many environmental regulations for the oil & gas industry, including expanding hydraulic fracturing aka fracking in California. In January, California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, sued the federal government to block new fracking in the state. But just this month, on April 3, 2020, the California oil regulators appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom issued 24 new permits for well stimulation that includes the use of fracking; and there are another 282 permits awaiting review. Meaning the corruption and willful ignorance of humanity lingers. Fracking takes what could be used as good drinking water and then mixes it with toxic chemicals and sand to blast away layers under the ground that will be riddled with holes forever, like Swiss cheese. And now there’s a bunch of water with toxic chemicals in it.
The kind of global response we human beings have mustered against the coronavirus is exactly the same kind of coordinated effort we need to slow down the ravaging effects of climate change. Here in LA we’re hunkering down during the pandemic, but we’re still working from home, driving occasionally to the grocery store, and generally polluting the air with fossil fuels for our hot water, home heating, electricity, and transportation. Mind-bogglingly, most of our tap water in LA still comes from the Colorado River, approximately 300 miles away. Living like this is not sustainable in the 21st century when we know that emissions from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases pollute our water and our food, and jeopardize our way of life in this coastal paradise. Ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and coastal flooding could wash away the dream of being by the beach. Some people are trying to do good, but there are still plenty of people doing bad. I feel a sense of hope and dread for the future.
“We’re dumbing down America. Science is not respected. There’s all sorts of problems that contribute to this, you know, sort of lazy approach to the real crisis that’s happening. I totally get it. I’m trying to stay on the side of not feeling like I want to give up every day,” said Dr. Cassie Rauser, Executive Director in charge of the day-to-day management of the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge. “But I actually look at sustainability and I feel like it’s solvable.”
Full disclosure: UCLA is my alma mater. Go Bruins!
In order to represent the options for future college students, I took the sustainability tours at the publicly funded UCLA, the privately funded Occidental College, and the publicly funded community college, Santa Monica College (SMC), before coronavirus shut down all college campuses.
This is important because you can’t plant food crops in a drought and you can’t plant food crops after a flashflood when there’s a foot of water covering your fields. That is called climate change; and it is majority-caused by excessive burning of fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal.
“The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.…Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes,” according to the EPA on September 13, 2019.
“*Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry in the United States is a net sink and offsets approximately 11 percent of these greenhouse gas emissions, not included in total above. All emission estimates from the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2017.”
[The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is the source of the pie graphic and the above explanations for the graphic.]
Here are three colleges in LA trying to make sure we have a sustainable future.
“When we announced these goals in 2013 everybody thought we were nuts. Everybody thought we were crazy. Like 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 is impossible. That’s crazy,” Dr. Rauser from UCLA said.
Nurit Katz, UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer, showed me that the student dorms now have a garden of leafy vegetables growing out of planter-columns on a patio that receives sunlight all day long. She also showed me the solar-electric system (turning sunlight into usable energy) covering one of the parking lots. There were plug-in stations for electric vehicles nearby that she said engineering students had built. UCLA engineers also devised a way to produce drinking water from vapor and store carbon emissions in building bricks, I have seen reported. I tried to interview the professors, engineers, and mathematicians at UCLA designing these new technologies, but media relations! Forgive me for saying, but I’m from Missouri; show me. Drinking water from vapor? Storing carbon emissions in bricks? Show me.
To promote zero-emissions transportation, UCLA maintenance crews drive miniature plug-in, electric vehicles that look similar to golf carts. I talked with a couple of maintenance guys who were tuned into the Climate Crisis; one of them was considering buying a Tesla electric car. Some of the commuter buses that run through campus are now fully electric, although the majority of UCLA’s buses still use fossil fuels. I walked from one end of the UCLA campus to the other and talked with everybody I could about sustainability. Shockingly, most people on UCLA’s campus I talked with were unaware of anything regarding sustainability beyond recycling. However, Kennedy Meyer, a UCLA student, told me about one of her professors demonstrating how it is possible to fly without fossil fuels.
“My work is really interdisciplinary. I’m based in the life sciences,” said Nicholas Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Biology and Society at UCLA. “I work across human toxic exposure and climate-change mitigation.”
He told me about a demonstration he devised to coincide with this art project in Argentina, where a woman pilot flew a hot-air balloon using just black fabric and the heat of the Sun. The Argentinian project, called Aerocene (https://aerocene.org/), is funded by the South Korean musical group, BTS, as part of their new public art initiative. To commemorate the flight of the Argentinian balloon, Professor Shapiro gathered his students on UCLA’s practice football field to observe an experiment of temperature differences as he turned a big swath of black fabric into a hot-air balloon. There was only a slight wind, but the sunlight heating up the air inside the black fabric made the makeshift balloon rise above the earth for all of his students to see.
At Occidental College, I witnessed more sustainability in action: environmentally retrofitted buildings, bioswales in the landscaping to capture rainwater, a student garden with a compost heap, and solar electricity covering a parking lot as well as more solar electricity on the hillside. Construction for solar electricity at Occidental College began in 2011.
“This is a college campus. It happens to be one of the more progressive college campuses. I never had to make the argument that solar was the moral good. Everybody gets that,” said Professor Daniel Snowden-Ifft, who teaches Physics at the private university about 10 miles east of Downtown LA. “At the end of the day, we got this $7 million solar installation for $3.5 million and we save on average $250,000 going now to $300,000 per year.” The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power paid for half of the solar system, he said.
In order to install the solar-electric panels on the hillside at Occidental College, a team of faculty members and employees had to convince the Board of Trustees that the solar system would save the college money and also be aesthetically pleasing.
So a design team drafted a plan to have the solar-electric system follow the curvatures of the hillside. Very Getty.
“The really neat kind of story about the solar array is it took all of us, right?” Professor Snowden-Ifft said. “The people that knew technical stuff, people that knew politics, people who knew art, and, of course, I don’t want to wax too philosophical here, but we’re a college of the liberal arts, and what we’re trying to promote here is that students that come out of our college should know a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Because that’s how you do big things.”
At Santa Monica College, I saw the sustainable cottage that is the Center for Environmental and Urban Studies, where the electric bill is only $5 a month because there are no lights, only solar tubes. They recycle the heat from the computer servers in the closet into the main part of the cottage. There’s a door that is now a coffee table. The kitchen counter is made from recycled material. The walls are stuffed with insulation made from recycled material. We get it! Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. It’s not exactly a house to host a Super Bowl party in, because it’s small and there’s no big screen TV. But it is quite cozy and it has a small solar-electric system on the roof, should you need the extra juice. It’s got sofas and desks, and a kitchen, like I said. It’s livable.
“We have all the solutions we need off the shelf, right here, today. We don’t need to invent our way out of the world’s problems. We just need to know what the solutions are available to us and invest in them. Right now we’re just not doing that,” said Ferris Kawar, SMC’s Sustainability Manager. “We don’t have a design problem. We have a political will problem. Entrenched industries want the status quo. They have invested a lot of money.”
When he got going, I just stood back and recorded it all for posterity. This is sustainability:
“Typically our business classes are generally run-of-the-mill. You know, they don’t bring in the impacts of externalities of the production process. We don’t really know what the true cost of a gallon of gas is because pollution is free. When there’s an oil cleanup, the government pays for a lot of it. The subsidies or to protect our assets across the globe. If you added all of those together, the cost of a gallon of gas would be 2 maybe 3 times the price at the gas station,” Kawar said. “When people understand that, things will change.”
He elaborated: “You know, we need more business classes that daylight that kind of stuff. They talk about it. That’s where I was getting to when you said, ‘What do you want to see at Santa Monica College, you know, in the near future? What’s the big goal?’ The students that come through here are the biggest impact we have on the planet. Yes, we use a lot of electricity as a million-square-foot campus. We use a lot of water. And we’re working hard to reduce each one of those areas. But when we have a student who comes through here and they go out into the working world, and they still don’t understand how their future careers impact the world, then we’ve failed. So we really need to make sure that every student in every field of study understands that the choices that they make, in their personal and in their professional lives, have a massive impact on the globe. We know that the government can make some of the needed changes, by, you know, passing laws to require more renewable energy, or this or that, but we are still massively impactful in the individual choices we’re making every day in the various business sectors. We need students to understand how their future careers could be done better. We need to train for the jobs of tomorrow, not the jobs of yesterday.”
But what about the drinking water for all of the people in LA?
“There’s no plan at this point to stop importing Colorado River water,” said Gary Gero, Chief Sustainability Officer for LA County. “We’re going to be spending a lot of money on what are called multi-benefit or nature-based solutions. We’re starting to capture that rainwater, that stormwater, and filtrate it into aquifers.”
He would also like to see LA implement a water-recycling program like several water districts in Southern California have already done by treating toilet wastewater for use as tap water.
“Look at the water that we currently throw away into the ocean after it’s been treated. Wastewater treatment plants spend an awful lot of money and resources to treat wastewater and then that is dumped five miles out into the ocean. And we really should be beneficially reusing that water in a number of ways,” Gero said. “It can also go into groundwater recharge.”
He stressed that the number one goal of any water program is to reduce consumption. From my own observations of human behavior, I do not think it is wise to rely on people curtailing their use of water, without price pressure. During the last drought of 2015, I asked a janitor outside one of the office buildings on Sunset Boulevard near Echo Park to stop using a hose to wash down the sidewalk. He held the hose up high above his head and sprayed water into the air as a response for a good 20–30 seconds. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know that approximately 90 percent of the water in LA comes from out of the region, according to Dr. Rauser from UCLA. (“Almost 90 percent of the water in LA comes from out of the region. In the county it’s like 60 percent,” she said). Maybe if water had cost more money, then the janitor wouldn’t have wasted so much of it?
“Stormwater capture is a huge piece of the Grand Challenge strategy for LA County,” Katz, from UCLA, explained. “As far as UCLA’s campus, we have some existing stormwater-capture systems, including one that was built into the new Geffen Hall building. And then one project that was recently installed that’s pretty exciting, because it was student-led, is we have a stormwater tank at parking structure 9 now. We’re working with our team to design educational signs to go there to again help with the outreach.”
During this coronavirus stay-at-home time it has been raining a lot, but on Wednesday, February 26, 2020, it was hot, dry, and windy in LA. The temperature was officially 79 degrees Fahrenheit, except the ambient air, instead of feeling pleasant, felt like standing next to an open oven. Firefighters were still cleaning up the mess at Marathon Oil because of a fire at the company’s refinery the night before. That oil refinery is the biggest on the West Coast for making gasoline, prices of which hovered around $5 per gallon at the pump in LA that day in February.
During the week the stock market would drop 12 percent on coronavirus fears (exposing the weakness in supply chains as well as the artificially inflated stock market propped up by companies buying back their own stock). In the next few weeks, the federal government would pump $1.5 Trillion into the stock market (the Dow Jones would drop 23 percent from its high in 2020), Congress would pass a $2 Trillion stimulus package, and millions of Americans would file for unemployment. Oil stocks also fell, but the price of gas at the pump stayed steady for another week, possibly to reflect the local supply disruption from the Marathon fire. It’s when Saudi Arabia and Russia started pumping more oil that gasoline got so cheap (less than $4 per gallon in LA). The oil-price war (1) punished smaller oil companies so government-run oil companies could consolidate power and (2) provided the polluting energy source at a lower price for many people to pump into their gas-powered cars. But due to coronavirus stay-at-home orders, driving is way down and so is the air pollution in LA. So who needs cheap gas if you’re not going anywhere? And who needs gas when you can use solar electricity to charge your electric car for cheaper than gas?
“Electricity is less expensive than gasoline and EVs are more efficient than gasoline vehicles. Electricity prices are also generally much more stable than gasoline prices. On a national average, it costs less than half as much to travel the same distance in an EV than a conventional vehicle,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy on February 1, 2020.
We, as a civilization, are paying exorbitant environmental prices for our use of fossil fuels, but most people are worried more about the coronavirus right now. Do people see the Climate Crisis as a slow death, and therefore it doesn’t worry them? I can see that the immediate threat of a pandemic grips people around me more viscerally than an increase of 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the average global temperature this century, which should worry the (blank) out of them. Because we’re seeing extreme weather events sooner than scientists predicted. Remember Houston flooded? Remember New York City flooded? Remember the Bahamas got shredded by a hurricane that sat on top of them? Remember the farm fields that flooded in Missouri and in Ohio? Remember the drought in California?
Why is it so difficult to get the majority of people to get the gut-check reality of global warming/climate change/the Climate Crisis? I’m more scared of our water and food supply drying up because of burning fossil fuels than I am about getting the coronavirus. For sure I wash my hands and avoid touching my face now, but I also feel guilty when I drive via gas or fill up with gas at the pump.
During my commute in February on the 405 freeway and along the surface streets of LA, I saw an airplane flying via fossil fuels over the freeway into Los Angeles International Airport; and I saw the oil refineries alongside the freeway spewing carbon emissions into the air; I saw the train tracks on the other side of the freeway with the scores of shipping containers ready to transport the oil & gas; I saw mostly gas-guzzling vehicles on the roads. I have to acknowledge that, even though I drive a hybrid vehicle, I am part of the problem by using fossil fuels to get around town (but we do use solar electricity at my home to charge a Tesla electric vehicle in the garage).
To be fair, in LA there are many homes with solar-electric systems and many people driving electric cars, but there needs to be way more people transitioning to clean energy in order to make up for the ubiquity of fossil fuels in the city of so-called angels.
We’ve turned a desert by the sea into a paradise full of imported palm trees. If we keep burning fossil fuels, then the rising ocean will wash away Los Angeles as if it all were just a dream.
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Justin Bass is an author and a freelance reporter. His novel for 2020 is Fresh from Farmers Valley (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fresh-from-farmers-valley-justin-bass/1131636905).
