SMOGTOWN

for every crisis there’s opportunity, and for every group of downtrodden people there are those who use ingenuity, generosity and a some competitive fire to make life better for those in desperate need. In L.A., we’re talking about the hundreds of thousands who go hungry and a terrific charity that deserves forests (whoops) err PC-worths of bytes. We’re talking CANSTRUCTION. Watch the video or hit their website and give what you can or conjure up what up you should. No human should EVER go hungry. Nope, not a single one.

Because of the holidays and my crazy schedule, I’m just now posting this. PR extraordinaire Julie Taylor told me in December about this event, which she is deeply involved in, and is worthy of some praise herself for her benevolence.

Here’s a link to the group’s website. One can CAN make a difference. Read up and you’ll see.

From the story titled, Electrical pollution from cell phones and WiFi may be hazardous

“In 1990, the city of La Quinta, CA, proudly opened the doors of its sparkling new middle school. Gayle Cohen, then a sixth-grade teacher, recalls the sense of excitement everyone felt: “We had been in temporary facilities for 2 years, and the change was exhilarating.”

But the glow soon dimmed.

One teacher developed vague symptoms — weakness, dizziness — and didn’t return after the Christmas break. A couple of years later, another developed cancer and died; the teacher who took over his classroom was later diagnosed with throat cancer. More instructors continued to fall ill, and then, in 2003, on her 50th birthday, Cohen received her own bad news: breast cancer … ”

This one falls under the environmental “Duh” category. Can you believe that Chinese smog drifts over the Pacific Ocean, adding to the West Coast’s pollution problem. It’s only a phenomenon that’s been heavily reported for years, and makes it way into our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution In Los Angeles based on a 2005 Wall Street Journal story. Well, the L.A. Times is catching up. Hooray. They can use a “recent study” to explain why they’re just awakening to a seriously scary pattern of atmospheric assault. Story link.

“Ozone from Asia is wafting across the Pacific on springtime winds and boosting the amount of the smog-producing chemical found in the skies above the Western United States, researchers said in a study released Wednesday.

The study, published in the journal Nature, probes a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists in the last decade: Ground-level ozone has dropped in cities thanks to tighter pollution controls, but it has risen in rural areas in the Western U.S., where there is little industry or automobile traffic.

The study, led by Owen R. Cooper, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, examined nearly 100,000 observations in the free troposphere — the region two to five miles above ground — gathered from aircraft, balloons and ground-based lasers.

It found that baseline ozone — the amount of gas not produced by local vehicles and industries — has increased in springtime months by 29% since 1984. The study has important implications both for the curbing of conventional pollution that damages human health and for controls on greenhouse gases that are changing the planet’s climate, experts said.”

Finally, Bill gets a little digital ink in the Huffington Post with a book review about the Southwest’s perennial drought. That silky prose dances on the page.

From the Los Angeles Times story:

“The Environmental Protection Agency proposed the nation’s strictest-ever smog limits this morning, a move that could put large parts of the country in violation of federal air quality regulations.

The EPA proposed allowing a ground-level ozone concentration of between 60 and 70 parts per billion, down from the 75-ppb standard adopted under President George W. Bush in 2008.

That means cracking down even further on the emissions from power plants, factories, landfills and motor vehicles which bake in sunlight and form smog.

Obama administration officials and environmental groups say the new standards align with the levels scientists say are needed to safeguard against increased respiratory diseases, particularly in children, and that they could save $100 billion in heath costs over time. The EPA also said compliance costs could total up to $90 billion nationwide.

A 65-ppb standard — the middle of the proposed range — would avert between 1,700 and 5,100 premature deaths nationwide in 2020, compared to the 75-ppb standard, the EPA estimates. The agency projects the stricter standard would also prevent an additional 26,000 cases of aggravated asthma, compared to the Bush-era standard, and more than a million days when people miss work or school …”

If you read our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, you’d know ozone sounds whimsical but is pretty deadly.

The new year could well ignite fireworks anew over the Anne Sholtz caper, a story we showcase in our book Smogtown and in Chip’s freelance articles about her intriguing case. It’s a tangled, air-pollution market story involving fraud, red flags, the CIA, a secretive prosecution and much more, with sticky lessons for the carbon market Pres. Obama wants enacted nationally. So far officials at Southern California’s smog-fighting agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, hasn’t wanted to acknowledge that their cap-and-trade, known acronymistically as RECLAIM, has been vulnerable to white-collar troubles, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice-L.A. office still probably wishes their mixed-bag prosecution of Sholtz went the way of Compuserve. As George Bush I would say, “Not gonna happen.” Probably.

From the Wall St. Journal/Dow Jones New Service story:

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- U.S. legislators have obtained a court order unsealing documents in a case involving a multi-million-dollar cap-and-trade fraud.

Republican legislators say the records–due to be opened to the public in early January–could shed light on the potential challenges of policing a new, trillion-dollar commodities market that would be created under climate legislation that Congress is considering.

In a rare filing by House lawyers, Reps. Joe Barton (R., Texas) and Greg Walden (R., Ore.), the ranking members respectively of the Energy Committee and the Oversight Subcommittee, asked a federal district court in California to unseal all the closed records regarding the successful prosecution for fraud of Anne Masters Sholtz, a former California Institute of Technology economist.

Lawmakers say Sholtz’s case could expose the weaknesses of a federal cap-and- trade system because it involved the same market mechanism meant to cut emissions …”

Be forewarned there are a lot of errors in these Republicans’ understanding of Sholtz’s case. It involved cap and trade for two smog-forming chemicals unrelated to global warming, and did NOT involve counterfeit credits. However, the federal case against Sholtz did NOT even mention an earlier action involving 500,000 in RECLAIM credits that allegedly bankrolled a CIA-associated currency repatriation effort. See here for that.

For more on this story, here is Rep. Barton’s comments about it and the judicial order lifting the veil of secrecy thrown over many of the case’s key documents.

Meanwhile, some European shenanigans … story link

“The top cops in Europe say carbon-trading has fallen prey to an organized crime scheme that has robbed the continent of $7.4 billion — a massive fraud that lawmakers and energy experts say should send a “red flag” to the U.S., where the House approved cap-and-trade legislation over the summer amid stiff opposition.

In a statement released last week, the Europol police agency said Europe’s cap-and-trade system has been the victim of organized crime during the past 18 months, resulting in losses of roughly $7.4 billion. The agency, headquartered in the Netherlands, estimated that in some countries up to 90 percent of the entire market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.

“These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments,” Rob Wainwright, Europol’s director, said in a statement …”

“In the first global assessment of the impact of ozone on climate warming, scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, evaluated how ozone in the lowest part of the atmosphere (the troposphere) changed temperatures over the past 100 years. Using the best available estimates of global emissions of gases that create ozone, the GISS computer model study reveals how much this single air pollutant and greenhouse gas has contributed to warming in specific regions of the world.

Ozone was responsible for one-third to half of the observed warming trend in the Arctic during winter and spring, according to the new research. Ozone is transported from the industrialized countries in the Northern Hemisphere to the Arctic quite efficiently during these seasons. The findings will be published soon in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres …”

Article link

We’ll have more about this soon.

Of course, we tease this subject in Smogtown.

On the same day that California unveiled details of its proposed West Coast cap-and-trade to attack greenhouse gases, two House Republicans vehemently opposed to President Obama’s national greenhouse-gas cap-and-trade announced they convinced the U.S. Department of Justice to unseal many of the documents in the enigmatic case of former-hotshot pollution broker Anne Sholtz. Barton and Walden had been pressing for answers about the case from the Justice Department for months now, igniting a whole bunch of behind the scenes activity and rather long-winded and vague regulatory defenses from the regional South Coast Air Quality Management District, which oversees the RECLAIM cap-and-trade for oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the district’s progress against smog. RECLAIM, short for the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market, began in 1993 as the planet’s first of its kind.

In those letters, which I’ll dig up later, the AQMD insists its systems are essentially scam-proof and the agency does seem to have a good regulatory track record if not for the Sholtz case and the rampant speculation that nearly detonated the market with spiking prices during California’s 2000 and 20001 electricity blackouts — the ones that exposed the likes of Enron’s. Curiously, the AQMD board is still waiting to fully hear an explanation of what occurred, so I’m told. Do the individual members even know about Sholtz’s alleged (but uncharged) misappropriation in mid-1998 of some 500,000 RECLAIM credits from Chevron, Exxon and Aera Corp. that she later sold to Southern California Edison? And how she poured the proceeds form that un-noticed transaction into a daring, alarming and apparently unsuccessful effort — code named “Operation Bald Headed Eagle” — to extract millions of dollars worth of cash, gold, and bonds of former U.S. aid to the Philippines using a cache of CIA and military Special Ops personnel, with supposed diplmomatic immunity no less?

The EPA, meantime, says it’s on top of RECLAIM and that, as of this summer, had no active investigations into any emissions markets anywhere in the country.

All in all it’s a complex, provocative story, one fraught with policy implications and headscratching human behavior, with spy-book sidelines and institutional hubris, and the charge in D.C. to get the lowdown on this now-closed criminal fraud case, in our opinion, is pretty nakedly political.

But wouldn’t it be something if Rep. Joe Barton of Texas (picture above) and Greg Walden of Oregon proved us wrong with a sincere, nonpartisan investigation into:

* how Sholtz TWICE gamed the system she helped concoct?

* why the AQMD and EPA failed to stop her sooner, and nobody at either agency seems very accountable?

* why the Justice Dept. has acted so secretly and oddly in this matter, apparently never following up on Sholtz’s explosive whistleblower tips once she was in custody?

* and how widespread the supposed-CIA and national security types Sholtz worked with in one cap-and-trade-financed “venture” have penetrated situations like this, and why there seems so little interest in probing whether we have a mini-Iran-Contra playing out while we all figured that was so 1980s of the Oliver North dimension?

I know. Click your heels three times and you’ll land in Kansas faster than the answers come here.

Here’s the link to Barton and Walden’s announcement. At the bottom are links to the motion and background documents, which I encourage the interested to read carefully. This was not some flimsy legal effort. It was surgical and well-researched.

If you want a more colorful and detailed look at the Anne Sholtz caper, please read my story, which ran in August in three different publications (before a bunch of blogs snatched ‘em). Here’s the definitive link to “Air of Deceit.”‘

The Hill, which covers the Capitol, has this brief story about the Barton-Walden initiative to get these secret records released.

“Senior Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are looking to a closed federal wire fraud conviction in California to bolster their argument against climate legislation.

Rep. Joe Barton (Texas), the senior Republican on the committee, and Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the top Republican on the committee’s oversight panel, have asked a federal court to unseal documents in the 2005 conviction surrounding a California pollution credit trading program. Barton calls the case a cautionary tale about setting up a massive nationwide carbon emissions trading market.

The two Republicans, who filed a motion Monday in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, want the pleadings unsealed in the case of Anne Masters Sholtz, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to one count of wire fraud following a six-count federal indictment for trying to game a Los Angeles-area pollution abatement initiative …”

In other news:

A somewhat predictable shift in American public opinion about global warming. Washington Post story

President Obama is not going to Copenhagen empty handed. He’s vowing to push for U.S. reductions in a bid to persuade the world, particularly India and China, to get serious as well. From the L.A. Times story

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Let’s remember what’s important when we return from the break. It’s called sincerity.

* From the L.A. Times story:

“A solar energy project proposed for development on public land in the Mojave Desert would create jobs mostly for Las Vegas and electricity for San Francisco at the expense of the relatively pristine area of east San Bernardino County where it would be built, San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt said …

‘Obviously, there is a lot of political pressure to get this project expedited and under construction,” Mitzelfelt said. “But its impacts in San Bernardino County and sensitive and scenic Mojave Desert environment are not worth the benefits.’ … ”

* Hmm, does this sound familiar – a green Ponzi scheme that slipped past the regulatory watchdogs? Not that many honest politicians want to discuss this. From the New York Times post

“Federal regulators have accused four people and two companies of using bogus claims about “green initiatives” to entice more than 300 investors into what was really a $30 million Ponzi scheme.”

* Power to … ummm, the windmills. Sorry, that’s politically incorrect green jabber. Power to the windturbines, micro or massive, whether they spin horizontally or merry-go-round style. Interesting story about this in the L.A. Times (link). Stay tuned on this subject.

* In a scene straight from our book, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, comes this latest effort to beat back global warming with “geo-engineering.” Anyone have an air pollution sewer blueprint ready to roll. What I find interesting isn’t the scientific bravado and ingenuity that some might otherwise tab hubris but a discussion of the unintended consequences of messing with Mother Nature.

From the L.A. Times piece:

“If there were some kind of panic button to stop global warming, what would it look like?

How about billions of tiny mirrors, launched into orbit to deflect solar rays away from Earth? Or big, fluffy clouds, artificially whitened so they reflect more sunlight back into space? Or maybe mechanical trees, ugly but effective at sucking carbon dioxide from the air along busy highways?

Outlandish as some of these proposals may seem, scientists and engineers are paying increasing attention to such ideas amid mounting evidence that human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc in some parts of the world.

The proposals belong to a field known as geo-engineering, or manipulation of the environment on a grand scale …”

* Think we’re too cynical here. Read on about what’s happened in China here.

* If that doesn’t depress you about what’s happening in Asia, you always have super-duper dirty L.A. Break out the bubbly – we’re the 7th most toxic city in America (depending on how you calculate that.) Link.

From the L.A. Daily News piece

“Jane Goodall, the champion of chimpanzees, knelt Monday over a newly planted sticky monkey flower and kissed its leaves for good luck.

She had come to Calabasas to tour a restoration project at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River. But as luck would have it, the sticky monkey flower had yet to be planted.

So the world-renowned primatologist and conservationist knelt, grabbed a handful of soil and sunk the plant into the earth.

While she travels all over the world to talk about the importance of conservation and environmental responsibility, Goodall said it all comes down to a very simple message: One flower planted on a hillside can evolve into a global movement.

“I’ve visited these types of restoration projects all over the world, and it always amazes me how Mother Nature restores herself,” Goodall said …”

Global warming:

* The latest on President Obama’s energy bill, and the politics of cap and trade. It’s about the mighty benjamin. Washington Post story.

* A still frightening Washington Post story about how fast temperatures may rise this century.

* Aspens dying off from global warming. Sounds pretty familiar to Ponderosa Pines and smog. This time we’re smarter, right? Story link from the L.A. Times.

* EPA cracking down on coal-fired power plants. Story.

Odds and ends, green-style:

* Terrifiic piece of enviro. investigative reporting. Gosh, what a connect. From a New York Times piece of late.

* Reactive air pollutants: story

Will the list ever end? Here’s the latest about urban smog and health in the the L.A. Times. Link.

” … Research on air pollution has been conducted worldwide for decades and is part of the basis for government regulation of air quality. Study after study has found more hospitalizations and higher death rates when certain pollutants are high. In addition to respiratory effects, research has established that air pollution increases the risk of cardiovascular events such as arrhythmia, heart attack and stroke, and the incidence of certain cancers.

In the appendicitis study, published Oct. 5 in the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, researchers examined records for 5,191 adults admitted to Calgary hospitals for appendicitis from 1999 to 2006. The dates of the patients’ admissions were compared to air pollution levels in the preceding week, using data from three air quality surveillance sites in the city.

The scientists found a significant effect of pollutants on appendicitis rates in the summer months among men, but not women …”

We hunker down and focus on the connection between good ol’ L.A. smog, in its many permutations, and the physical wellbeing of millions of Southern Californians exposed to it pretty much daily for years on end, in our book, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.