The weather of Venice Beach, California, where I live, is for the most part stable, and almost always predictable. No sudden squalls appear out of the southwest to chase skateboarders off their concrete ramps; never do we hear the civil-defense sirens warning of an approaching tornado. Living here, swimming and surfing at the beach a […]
Judith Lewis Mernit
Posted inGoat
California gears up to fine water wasters: Should we turn our neighbors in?
Five years ago, when south-central Texas was suffering through its driest year in more than a century, public officials in the city of San Antonio turned in desperation to a new tactic to enforce water conservation: They dispatched the police. From April of 2009 and on through the rest of the year, off-duty officers and […]
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The transformative power of… efficiency
As streamlined shorebirds rose and dove amid sailboats in San Diego’s Mission Bay one recent afternoon, scores of energy wonks gathered in the over-cooled ballrooms of the Hyatt Regency. They’d come to deliberate on the impending disruption to the conventional electrical industry, brought on by tightening carbon restrictions and ever more people making electricity on […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The leak heard ‘round the nuclear industry
A radioactive leak in New Mexico will make solutions to our waste problem even more elusive.
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How to cut carbon: Change the way utilities make money
State renewable energy standards, imposed on “investor-owned” utilities that supply 75 percent of the power in the United States, have long stood stalwart in the space left empty by the absence of a federal energy or climate policy. They have devalued climate-changing coal and encouraged wind and solar, particularly in the West, where the kind […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Why we risk life and property
Dangerous places in the West are often the most desirable.
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Wildlife and rodenticides: The new silent spring?
The Griffith Park mountain lion, discovered wandering the urban wilds above Los Angeles in the late winter of 2012, has been celebrated like none other of its kind. While mountain lions menace suburbs in Colorado and distress ranchers in Arizona, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California, the rare cougar is widely viewed as […]
Posted inArticles
The energy haves and have-nots
Will rooftop solar owners get off the grid — and leave other power users in the dark?
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Go West, clean megawatts
Nevada stakes its renewable energy future on California.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
California’s energy policies have ripple effects across the West
As the Golden State shifts from coal to clean, economies in other states feel it too.
Posted inGoat
Los Angeles City Council votes for a fracking moratorium — and hopes the state follows suit
During the suddenly rainy last week in February, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban fracking within city limits. It might have seemed like an academic exercise, just as it did a few years ago, when the five-person city council of Beverly Hills, Calif., voted four to one to quash the city’s oil industry […]
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Enviros and industry agree: Keystone XL means more oil. Why does the State Department disagree?
It’s hard to know where to begin unpacking the U.S. State Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement on the controversial Keystone XL, the transcontinental pipeline that has been proposed to transport heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. On one hand, the document admits that from “wells to […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 2014: Building a More Sustainable West, One City at a Time
Is basic solar technology the key to an energy revolution?
Plain old photovoltaic panels and innovations in energy storage and distributed generation could remake our electricity system.
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California Energy Commission says no to desert solar plant that could kill birds
It came as a shock last spring, at least to me, when BrightSource Energy decided to suspend its Hidden Hills Solar project near Pahrump, Nev. For starters, I had a story going to press whose conclusions were somewhat tied to the looming specter of Hidden Hills, a large concentrating solar “power tower” project which would […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
The national park popularity contest
An Oklahoma senator’s financial fix for our national treasures.
Posted inGoat
Dead Southern California puma would have spread genetic diversity
As I wrote in High Country News last spring, the pumas of Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains are dying — slowly, but quite literally — for lack of genetic diversity. Blocked from migration by freeways, development and the Pacific Ocean, the lions have begun to inbreed; researchers studying the lions have, through DNA tests, found […]
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NPS Director Jon Jarvis on shutdown rage and funding needs for the service
National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis had not come to Rubén Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on October 24 to talk about government shutdowns, Tea Partiers in Congress or the privatization of public lands. He had come instead to promote the park service’s American Latino Heritage initiative, a prototype of a new kind of […]
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When a rare puma dies during a government shutdown, who do you call?
Dan Cooper didn’t know about the mountain lion until the local news media called on Monday afternoon to tell him. By that time, the animal had been dead for several hours; all anyone knew was that it had been struck by a car on the 101 freeway, which cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains on […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
What do you know?
Author Percival Everett defies categories and generalizations.
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Environmentalists turn on California’s first real fracking law
Earlier this month, the Environmental Working Group — the D.C.-based nonprofit that helps the green-conscious decide which sunscreen to wear and what to wash their dishes with — was rallying California followers to contact state legislators in support of a bill to regulate fracking. The sun was about to set on California’s 2012-2013 legislative session […]