Streetsblog Los Angeles

When I first decided to conduct a series of interviews instead of guest posts to keep Los Angeles Streetsblog fresh while I'm away next week, I wanted to talk with some people that were and weren't regular readers and with at least one person who would be entirely new to me.

Jessica Meaney at the Southern California Association of Governments suggested Angela Johnson-Meszaros, a tireless advocate on behalf of air quality and implementation of A.B. 32, the groundbreaking legislation that rocketed California to the front of the air quality movement.  I was able to sit down with Johnson-Meszaros at a Pasadena coffee house on chilly Monday afternoon.

Streetsblog:  Let’s start with some of the basics, such as who are you and what do you do for a living?

AJM:  I’m Angela Johnson-Meszaros.  I’m with the California Environmental Rights Alliance and my title there is director of policy and general counsel.   The Alliance works at the local level providing technical assistance  to community organizations that are mostly working on air-quality issues.  We work on brownfields and water quality and other issues such as land use that are relevant for communities’ quality of life. 

We work on the regional level mostly at the Southwest Regional Air Quality Management District on policy, rulemaking and regulation.  My colleague Joe Liu sits on their governing board.  At the state level we do lobbying and regulatory work around air quality and public health issues and other community participation.  Right now, I’m co-chairing the state’s A.B. 32 Implementation Advisory Committee.

Streetsblog: Just in case anyone doesn’t know, can you give a brief description of A.B. 32, what it is and what it does?

AJM:    A.B. 32 is the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.  Passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor in 2006.  The purpose of A.B. 32 is to have California reduce it’s Greenhouse Gas emissions.  The goal was to have our emissions in 2020 to be what our emissions were in 1990. 

As part of that effort, there is a three part process.  The first part are early actions the state took to reduce green house gases.  The second piece, which we’re in right now, lays out the scoping plan from where we are now to 2020.  The third phase begins in 2012 which is the implementation phase.  Between 2012  and 2020 is when we hope to really begin reducing emissions.

Streetsblog: Ok.  So, how are we doing?

AJM:  (laughs) Not so good.  I work primarily with environmental justice communities, primarily low-income communities and communities of color.  These communities are often are the host of a lot of air pollution and are most impacted by the inability of California to deal with not only Greenhouse Gasses but also the criteria and air pollutants.  Most notably, people think of smog.

We thought A.B. 32 had a lot of promise for dealing with the health issues caused by air pollution.  People in Los Angeles don’t usually recognize that for most of the South Coast area, which is all of LA County, Orange County, Riverside and San Bernadino Counties, the average person is exposed to a  1 in 15,000 chance of contracting cancer just from the air quality.  Depending upon where you live, if you live near the port, those chances are close to 1 in 7,000 or 1 in 8,000.

So, we have bad air quality.

If you think about transportation, a large portion of that pollution comes from our transportation infrastructure, cars and trucks with diesel toxins being the largest contributor.

Streetsblog: When you talked about the “early actions” the state is taking now, what are some of the things the state can do between now and 2012 while the state is planning.  Are we already on our way?

AJM: Well, there’s a long, exciting political tale that we can tell when we’re talking about the implementation of the early action items.  In the shortest possible telling, they were supposed to adopt the series of early action, the so-called low hanging fruit.  They went through a huge process, including a multiple day international conference.  They brought in people from all over, to talk about what can be done…

Streetsblog:…they got on the cover of TIME Magazine…

AJM:…on the cover of TIME Magazine.  The Governor was very fancy.   There’s all this stuff going on, but what ultimately ended up happening was they adopted three early action goals.

One of them was the low-carbon fuel standard which was supposed to reduce the carbon intensity of our transportation fuels.  One was a methane capture of landfill gases.  This is one thing our committee pushed hard for the inclusion of.  For a variety of reasons this proposal is zero dollars to implement.

After adopting the three, the Governor fired the Chair of the Air Resources Board.  There was a lot of turmoil.  The legislature was unhappy.  We were unhappy.  Everyone was unhappy.  That’s when Mary Nichols got the job as chair of the Air Resources Board.  Then we adopted another set of measures to improve air quality.

We are making progress…

Streetsblog: Do you believe the political problems that came up during the first implementation phase our things that are going to keep popping up as we try to implement other parts of this law?

AJM: This is an incredibly political process.  Implementation, the decision about what kinds of things to implement, what is doable, and what is not doable has been an incredibly political process.  In fact, there has been a fight going back to before A.B. 32 was even adopted about whether or not to use a policy tool called “Cap and Trade”  as the way to address our Greenhouse Gas emissions.

The environmental justice community has long opposed “Cap and Tradeing.”  There is a lot of evidence from around the world that every time a pollution trading program has been tried, it hasn’t worked.  That seems like something that should be worthy of consideration when you’re making your policy choices, but it hasn’t happened that way.  It’s very clear the governor wants to have a trading program that’s what he’s put out there from the very beginning.  There’s a lot of mainstream environmental groups that have joined him so we’re moving forward with that.  However, it’s created a lot of turmoil.

In short, this will always be a political process because there are a lot of people who are winners and losers in this process.  I think the most recent version of this has been in the last couple of weeks when ARB had to do their economic analysis.

ARB sent out their economic analysis for peer review.  The peer reviewers all came back and said that their economic analysis was really bad.  It’s just substandard.  It couldn’t possibly be worse that it is.  That was the same thing that we’ve been saying.  It looks like you decided on the policy first and then constructed an analysis to support the choice you already made.

Then, the legislative analysis office did a report on it.  Their report said, “You know, this really isn’t so good.”  But, the ARB said it was fine  and they’re going to adopt the thing on Thursday.

Streetsblog:  Hooray!  A story idea for Wednesday.

ALM: In particular for transportation issues, one of the early action measures included was this low carbon fuel standard which is supposed to reduce the carbon intensity of fuel.  Really, for California, in order to reduce the intensity of carbon in fuel, what we’re talking about is corn based ethanol.  That’s a very significant issue that we should consider when thinking about transportation policy.  Because it’s very clear that corn-based ethanol is not a good way to fuel our cars.

Burning food for fuel is a poor idea.

It effectively, literally, causes worldwide starvation.  We can feed 100 people for the same amount of corn that it takes to fill one tank of an SUV.  Part of the increase in food prices has been driven – pardon the pun – by the increasing use of corn-based ethanol for fuel.

It’s got all these ripple problems for hunger issues worldwide.  The U.N. has called for a five year moratorium  on using corn-based ethanol because of this issue of it making the world more hungry.   It’s also leading to price increases in the United States, in California, and locally of corn.  Since corn is such a building block, it leads to increases for eggs, for milk, for everything on the food chain.

This leads to the building of these large farm refineries that are being planned in the Central Valley.  They have pretty serious air pollution issues.  They also have massive impacts on water.  There was a report about a year and a half ago where it was estimated that just by growing the corn that you would need to meet the federal ethanol requirement would completely deplete all of the aquifirs underneath South Dakota.

And…it’s not even clear that it reduce Greenhouse Gasses.

So, what does all this mean.

What it means that we have this moment where the public is really focused on dealing with climate change.  The public is also focused on a lot of transportation issues if for no other reason than in Los Angeles you can’t go anywhere.  It’s just not convenient to travel.  That creates a lot of opportunities to really think about how we move ourselves around the region.  For those of us that care about the urban environment, wanting to create a cleaner urban environment and the roll of transportation in those environments, this is really an opportunity to interact with decision makers to say that we need to make decisions that will result in positive things.

This is the time to do it.

We have an extra opportunity with the economic collapse because there are going to be HUGE amounts of money available for infrastructure.  For those of us that care about these issues it’s time to say, “You’re not really going to build another eight lane highway.  We should build some real urban infrastructure that makes our communities more livable and walkable.  You’re going to take seriously walking paths.  You’re going to think about liking residential centers to retail and other places people want to go.  That’s what we want our tax money to be used for.  We’re all going to work on making our urban environment more sustainable.”

We also would get the kind of communities where people can connect on a more personal level.  That would reduce the amount of transportation, the amount of fossil fuels, that we use and now the agri-fuels that we use.  That would have a TREMENDOUS impact on our health because of what would happen to our air…Studies show that particulates from Diesel fuel kills more than 24,000 people a year.  That’s more than die in car crashes in the state of California and more than the number of people that were killed by second hand smoke.

If we were able to take this opportunity and really require that they put the interests of all of us first, instead of all of them first, whoever they are, it would make a massive, huge difference.

Streetsblog:  If you could give one piece of advice that might be out of the box on how we can make our air cleaner, what would it be?

AJM: As an individual, there are three key things that every individual can do.

The first is to really think about one opportunity to begin leaving your car at home and start taking some other way to get to your destination.  What you’ll find is there are lots of ways to get around without taking your car.  It may seem on an individual level that it doesn’t matter that much, but really what you’re doing is setting up a framework that makes everything a more viable option.

All of a sudden you’ll notice things like, “If there were a crosswalk here it would be easy to walk my kid to school everyday.

The second thing is to contact an elected official.  Take the time, make a phone call, send a letter…those things make amazing impacts in political offices.  They take note when they start to get letters from people.  It doesn’t have to be a massive treatise, it just has to ask them to take leadership on a particular issue.

Once you’ve done those two things, you’re well on your way to the third thing which is, having casual conversations with people about what you’re doing.  Don’t accost people, but let them know and encourage them to join you.

Streetsblog: I’m going to ask this question of everyone we interview for this series, if I remember.  It’s magic wand time.  If you could change one thing, having to do with transportation, what would it be?

AJM:  Maybe I’m tainted, because I work on this all the time…

Streetsblog: Everyone gives strange answers

AJM: I think the key issues of our time is whether we can harness the interest and focus around climate change.  I think Cap and Trade can dissipate all of that.  One thing that I would say is to have a climate change program that focuses on how we make and use energy.  From there, all good things would flow.

Images: Climate Action Team, Marten Law