SMOGTOWN

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in this press release that Anne Sholtz, a then-high-flying entrepreneuer instrumental in creation of the planet’s first smog cap-and-trade, had admitted to defrauding an obscure New York-based energy trader called AG Clean Air. Sholtz’s little-noticed plea and corporate bankrutpcies ignited a mess that still has many smarting and confused, while giving global warming skeptics such as Texas Rep. Joe Barton ammunition to question the prudence of Pres. Obama’s hope for a greenhouse gas market. Oh yeah, there’s also this issue of whether Sholtz, a former Caltech economist and owner of a resplendent mansion, perpetrated an earlier fraud –with the supposed help of ex-CIA and military operatives — that never went investigated or flagged by authorities. See my story about her and “Operation Bald Headed Eagle” for the particulars.

Now, lookie here. The apparent parent company of AG Clean Air,  is one of the creditors of the Tribune Corp. bankruptcy. For those who don’t know, Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times, our hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune and other media assets. As this story shows, former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner is bidding to become Tribune’s post-bankruptcy chairman.

Here’s a crucial passage: “… Tribune and its creditors are still struggling to negotiate a settlement around charges that (Sam) Zell’s 2007 leveraged buyout was a case of “fraudulent conveyance,” meaning the transaction rendered the company insolvent from Day One. That settlement would serve as the basis for a plan of reorganization, but depending on how negotiations go, it could be months in coming or the case could easily devolve into litigation.

Nobody in the case doubts that senior creditors led by money center bank JPMorgan Chase and two hedge funds, Angelo, Gordon & Co. and Oaktree Capital Management, will end up owning Tribune by virtue of their $8.6 billion in claims …”

In a earlier article, the L.A. Times depicted Angelo, Gordon & Co. as a “distressed-debt hedge fund.” Here’s the company’s website, so judge for yourself.

When I contacted the company for comment about my last story on Shotz last summer, the PR flack initially denied there was a connection between AG Clean Air (which apparently stood for Angelo, Gordon Clear Air) and Angelo, Gordon & Co. until I disputed otherwise and said the court documents show the exact same New York address for both entities: 245 Park Ave., 26th floor, New York, NY 10167.

Coincidene? I think not.

Whether AG Clean Air still exists is not clear. That the parent is the same one entangled in the debacle that Sam Zell created with his highly leveraged Tribune purchase some years back seems undeniable.

How Sholtz and AG fit into the L.A. air-pollution saga is detailed and contexualized in our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.

 Revelations that a growing plume of chromium-six-laced groundwater is spreading through L.A.’s acquifers and soil hasn’t captured the attention it deserves in a summer of high-anxiety about Afghanistan, the endless recession, the oil spill in the Gulf, and, of course, Lindsay Lohan’s rebab. The highly toxic industrial chemical has forced the L.A. Department of Water and Power to quietly close fifty-five wells after long downplaying the problem. Chromium-six, a.k.a. chrome-six and hexavalent chromium, owes much of its presence here to Cold War military production and plating operations. Until recently, L.A., Burbank and Glendale dealt with its chromium-six tainted water by dumping it in the Los Angeles River or blending it with clean supplies, because it is a difficult chemical to filter at traditional treatment facilities.

I’ve writing about the subject for close to sixteen years, and figured I’d post those stories from latest to oldest so those affected by this under-the-radar, oft-lethal chemical can understand its history without alarmism or apathy.

* “Clearing the waters: New charges point out dearth of prosecutions in chromium 6 cases of contaminated groundwater“ - Los Angeles CityBeat, November 18, 2004.

* “Impossible Choices: while cleaning up solvents in L.A.’s water supply, did regulators pull another potentially deadly chemical into the pipes?” - Los Angeles CityBeat, July 8, 2004.

* “Dropping Science: chromium-six is a known carcinogen, but the implosion of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists means we still don’t know how much is safe in L.A.’s drinking water” - Los Angeles CityBeat, June 3, 2004.

* “Troubled Waters: chromium-six is the same poison made infamous by Erin Brockovich. Now it poses a ‘clear and present danger’ to the water supply of Los Angeles” - Los Angeles CityBeat, April 22, 2004.

* “DWP Failed to Inform Council on Tainted Water” – Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2000 

* Calls for Reducing Chromium in Water Go Unheeded - Los Angeles Times, August, 20, 2000.

* “Lockheed Fears Persist: Burbank-Area Residents Dispute Cancer-Incident Survey” - Daily News of Los Angeles, November 3, 1996.

* “Memos Detail Lockheed Settlement” – Daily News of Los Angeles, September 30, 1996.

* “Lockheed Quagmire Grows: Contractor Wants Pentagon to Pay Hunk of Toxic Cleanup Tab” - Daily News of Los Angeles, September 15, 1996.

* “Toxic Law May Have Swayed Lockheed Case” – Daily News of Los Angeles, August 26, 1996.

* “Lockheed Resolves Toxic Claims: Residents near Burbank B-1 plan to receive $60-million” - Daily News of Los Angeles, August 4, 1996.

* The startling picture of smogged out L.A. was the cover shot for a Wired magazine feature story about Southern California’s epic fight for blue skies against it’s own people’s auto addiction. They were gracious to highlight our book, Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, and interviewed me. Here’s a little blurb:

“… People in Los Angeles were very proud of their air,” said Chip Jacobs, one of the authors of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Smog in Los Angeles. “They said that L.A. was the land of pure air, and that moving there could cure tuberculosis and alcoholism. They thought there had to be one simple answer.” The day after the first big smog, city officials pointed to the Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Street Plant as the source of the thick cloud. The facility manufactured an ingredient in synthetic rubber called butadiene. Public pressure temporarily shut down the Aliso Street Plant, but the smog episodes continued to get even worse. Undeterred, Los Angeles Mayor Fetcher Bowron announced in August that there would be “an entire elimination” of the problem within four months. But the search for the culprit of the “gas attacks” — and the ensuing battle to curb the culprit’s emissions — was just beginning …”

* An interesting MSNBC piece about scientists’ progress in creating artificial lungs. Gosh, L.A. would be the perfect test city.

” … Nearly 400,000 people die of lung diseases each year in the United States alone, according to the American Lung Association, and lung transplants are far too rare to offer much help. But how to replicate these spongy organs? Niklason’s team stripped an adult rat’s lung down to its basic structural support system, its scaffolding, to see if it would be possible to rebuild rather than start completely from scratch …”

* For now, forget using the prospect of a green-jobs bonanza to convince Congress and the American public to support the national climate bill stalling in Washington, D.C.  From the L.A. Times blog.

* Speaking of cap-and-trade, California and other regions, though not the first ones envisioned, may enact their own greenhouse market. Good luck getting voters to support it in this jobless recovery or keeping fraud at bay. From the L.A. Times story.

“As the nation’s most populous state and the world’s eighth-largest economy, California wields significant influence. International and national controls are needed to curb global warming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday, “but California and the rest of the Western Climate Initiative partners are not waiting to take action.”

” … The Western initiative would cut emissions 15% below 2005 levels. It would transition the region to “a green economy that will reduce our dependency on oil, increase our energy security and create jobs and investment now,” Schwarzenegger said in a statement. The trading program would allow companies to meet targets by purchasing less expensive “offsets” from forests, agriculture or garbage dumps when companies in those sectors store carbon dioxide beyond what they would have emitted in the normal course of business …”

* I’ve probably written a dozen stories about L.A.’s unheralded crisis with deadly hexavalent chromium (otherwise known as “chrome-six,” or the Erin Brockovich chemical) creeping and moving through its acquifiers and land. In 2004, I did a series about it for Southland Publshing and in 2000 I covered the subject for the L.A. Times. Unfortunately, the problem is getting worse. Here’s the L.A. Daily News coverage (and the Daily News deserves lots of credit for its mid-1990s stories on chrome-six related to Lockheed Corp; I was lucky to have on the team that wrote about it). With all the focus on greenhouse gases and the drought, we’ve all forgotten about a deadly industrial poison spreading through wells and leaving local officials with tricky decisions to make.

Texas Congressman Joe Barton, along with fellow Republican Greg Walden, last year pressured the Justice Dept. to release documents on the secretive prosecution of former high-flying, emissions-broker Anne Sholtz. Barton, a global warming skeptic and longtime champion of big oil, made news again recently for his comments that the federal mandate for BP to set aside $20 billion for cleanup of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill amounted to a “slush fund” and shakedown. Guess what? He was forced to apologize.

Washington Post story on his outburst, which was curious to say the least. Here’s the official contrition from him in an MSNBC update.

I’m just wondering when Barton will get around to explaining why he and House lawyers and investigators were chomping at the bit to learn more about Sholtz and what her air pollution-exchange scandal says about a  possible greenhouse gas cap-and-trade, when a national energy/climate bill was on the front burner, and why he’s allowed it slip from it from his political consciousness now that the bill’s propsects faded.  Could it be Barton’s entire reasoning was to slam Obama, via California, and shield the petroleum sectors? Naw, couldn’t be.

In any event, my story on Sholtz — and it’s contexualized and expanded in our book Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles – won gold in the Southern California Journalism Awards Sunday night. I dislike even mentioning this, because I am ambivalent about subjective honors, but in this case I make an exception because after all these years, there is still more heat than light about the Sholtz caper and Barton’s real motives, let alone why the Justice Dept. handled her the way it did and all that CIA stuff.

Here’s my little Op-Ed on the lessons of former emissions broker Anne Sholtz, who defrauded the very smog cap-and-trade she helped concoct. We write about her spectacular and alarming escapades at length, as well as about L.A.’s air pollution market, in Smogtown: the Lung Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.

“In the toxic air of Los Angeles is a primer on human nature as we debate a national cap-and-trade for greenhouse gases.

During the 1990’s, Southern California manufacturers, weary of decades of stern regulation, wanted a new way to shrink their emissions of sky-smudging, health-damaging oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. Their answer was the planet’s first smog cap-and-trade system. Its name was awkward — the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market, or Reclaim — but its implications seismic. Industry finally had flexibility in achieving its cuts, and a motive to reduce more than their yearly pollution cap. They could sell unneeded “credits” for profit!

Though environmentalists caterwauled about corporate sellout, the anti-smog officials were on board. For years, they’d been sandwiched between federal clean air mandates and industry accusations that they had crippled the region’s manufacturing muscle with overzealous rulemaking. Why not allow the market to be the magic?

Leading this vanguard environmentalism was Anne Masters Sholtz, a 30-something Caltech economics professor and aspiring emissions-broker. Her brokerage, which used the Web and advanced software to match trades, lined up heavyweight clients and enlisted marquee financial institutions as trade clearinghouses. Sholtz bought a spectacular hillside estate, won niche celebrity, and had a seemingly blue-sky future in the mecca of whiskey-brown air.

The problem is the system was vulnerable. During California’s electricity brownouts in 2000 and 2001, speculators made a killing off the boutique, $90-million-a-year market by hoarding credits the utilities needed to run full time. By then, Sholtz had twice fleeced the system.

In 1996, she misappropriated roughly $2 million in credits belonging to Chevron, then Mobil Corporation and another client and sold them to Southern California Edison. A few years later Sholtz lulled another client, a New York-based trading outfit called A.G. Clean Air, into believing she owned credits the company needed to complete a lucrative trade with Mobil. In truth the credits weren’t available.

Predictably, local regulators were in the dark about both episodes until industry complained to them. As her case illustrates, and Europe’s cap-and-trade scandals corroborates, even the best-intentioned oversight is laps behind sophisticated schemers, be they full timers or just desperate like Sholtz. Concoct a market anywhere, whether for beads or subprime mortgages, and they’ll show up.

Two House Republicans today are moving to unseal court records of Sholtz’s federal prosecution in a ham-fisted effort to hurt President Obama’s chances for a carbon market. If there’s chicanery with smog, imagine a trillion-dollar greenhouse market, they say. But the Sholtz case is too important for politicization, because global warming is a global threat now.

I’m against Obama’s plans because a more straightforward carbon levy seems more cost-effective and less contrived. Yet cap-and-trades can work, as they generally have in L.A., as long as we remember that to make a commodity out of something is to arouse temptation.”

To read the entire New York Times “Room for Debate” online forum, click here.

Here’s the link to my last story about Sholtz and L.A.’s cap-and-trade. It’s a tale of environmental fraud and foreign intrigue unlike any others.

Here’s the tease to my Op-Ed on the subject.

“Californians: meet your sun. Or, rather, remember it.

Despite living in America’s premier green state, most of the state’s homeowners continue to rebuff solar power as a way to shrink their electricity bills, and simply plug into their local public utility much as their parents did.

The numbers paint the apathetic picture. Out of 7.7-million single family homes statewide, only about 50,000 have roof-mounted photovoltaic cells. In Los Angeles, the nation’s eighth sunniest city, only 1,627 homes boast solar hookups …”

There’s a lot more to say, and I will, but for now, I encourage you to read the opposing viewpoints and reader commentaries.

Right now, to reiterate, no matter California’s “status” as the greenest of greens, a meager 1 out of 154 homeowners currently use solar power. Does that sound like consumer acceptance to you? I fear we may learn how catastrophic this is as the environment continues to degrade and we experience an earthquake, terrorist attack or other awful event that knocks out power plants and leaves people with no way to electrify their lives and meet their needs until the juice is back on (and yeah, I know you need a fuel cell).

Anyway, here’s the link and I hope it proves a little thought-provoking. Just don’t buy into labels. Buy into the numbers and the big picture.

Here’s a look at three technologies that California residents are using to cut their energy bills and turn their homes into clean, mini-power plants.

February 7, 2010

By CHIP JACOBS

Note to readers: the following story is a longer, slightly different version of the article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other outlets on February 5, 2010. To see that version, click here.

Not long ago, most Californians harvesting green energy at home had pretty much one way to turn: toward their eaves. Rooftop solar panels might’ve resembled giant aviator-sunglasses, with a typical setup costing as much as a luxury car, but they at least delivered power-bill savings without anxiety. Trying to capture rustling winds or subterranean heat or even streamside hydro-electricity sounded as farfetched as it did impractical, and never found consumer traction.

Well, chalk another one up for the green revolution.

Today, with more user-friendly technology on the market and meaty taxpayer-subsidies available to begin popularizing the concept, the era of limited choices is fading. Homeowners out to shrink their reliance on the local utility grid and live greener without opting for standard solar-cells can now do so, depending on where they reside and their tenacity to stick with it.

Experts believe converging trends makes it an idea worth bouncing around. As energy demands continue to tick upwards and governments crack down further on greenhouse gases, everyone – including consumers who previously shrugged off home-generation as a quixotic extravagance — will likely pay more for their electricity and natural gas.

New power plants are just prohibitively expensive to build. And no one knows when the next energy crisis will strike.

“Renewable energy produced at home shouldn’t just be for the granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing people,” said Angelina Galiteva, chairwoman of the non-profit World Council for Renewable Energy. “It should be for everyone.”

But will more than a hardy band of believers really commit to churning out kilowatts in their own backyards and communal grounds, when just one of 154 California single-family homeowners right now even run solar cells? Will the temptation to lock down energy costs, or the desire for more self sufficiency, catch on in the forward-looking West Coast as it has throughout Europe?

Check back in 2030 for concrete answers. For now, take a look what at some are already doing.

SMALL WIND

People driving along gusty interstates near such places as Palm Springs are accustomed to seeing commercial wind farms, where turbines as high as buildings spin lazily against a blue sky. These days, a modest but growing number of individuals are trying that technology inside their own fence-lines.

Roughly 10,500 small turbines were sold to homes, farms and businesses nationwide in 2008, according to the American Wind Energy Assoc. While the numbers aren’t in yet for 2009, demand remained strong in spite of the Great Recession, said Elizabeth Salerno, the association’s director of data and analysis. A survey of small-turbine manufacturers has projected a 30-fold increase in the U.S. market by 2013.

Locally, some of the growth is emanating from companies eager to contain their electricity tabs. In Palmdale, for instance, city officials have cleared the way for businesses to install wind turbines up to 60-fee-high to crank out their own clean power. Among them is Wal-Mart, which has a 17-turbine project planned for its Sam’s Club outlet in Palmdale.

Potential wise, though, the largest new pool of converts may be individuals such as Ernest Ramirez. He and his wife live in Oak Hills, an unincorporated, blustery section of western San Bernardino County dotted with spacious homes on multi-acre lots. They inherited their wind turbine when they bought their 3,250-square-foot property equipped with a pool and hot tub in 2003.

Ernest Ramirez can’t imagine life without out it now.

Perched on a slender tower about 80-feet high, the turbine has three, 10-foot-long blades that whip often enough to keep his power bills from Southern California Edison at about $100 a month, or roughly a quarter of what he calculates he’d fork out otherwise.

Gusts are so fierce in this part of the Cajon Pass that they have been known to snap trees and jackknife semi-trucks. But Ramirez welcomes a bad hair day. His 10-kilowatt device, which initially struck him as a hovering insect, not only is a money saver. It salves his environmental conscience.

“When I get out of my car and it’s blowing 35-mph and I have to stay inside the house, at least I know I’m saving money,” said Ramirez, a 46-year-old grant writer. “Wind is such a precious resource.”

Ramirez said he can count seven neighbors with their own wind turbines. When the blades on his turn fiercely, they produce a droan that Ramirez compares to a helicopter takeoff. All things considered, it’s a racket he’s happy to have.

Still, what works in windblown San Bernardino County won’t necessarily fit everywhere.

To make economic sense, a homeowner considering a turbine should live in an area where 10-mph winds are frequent, and be paying at least 10-cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, according to the wind association. Permitting is also a challenge in many communities; some neighbors consider the spinning contraptions as noisy and eyesores and even a threat to birds.

The technology certainly isn’t cheap, running about $3,000 to $6,000 per kilowatt installed or roughly $30,000 for an average system, experts say.

Sweeteners are being dangled to cushion some of that sticker shock. Homeowners can get a hefty rebate from the state of California – as much as $12,500 for a typical 5-kilowatt setup. They’re also eligible for a 30-percent Investment Tax Credit from the federal government.

GEOTHERMAL

Everybody knows that solar panels and wind turbines are rock stars of today’s renewable energy world. Fewer might suspect that one of the more intriguing contenders to reduce high utility bills cooks right under our feet.

Geothermal heat pumps, which have been around since World War II, consume 25-perent to 50-percent less electricity than conventional systems, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Their magic comes from the physics of heat-exchange and vapor compression.

First, pipes are buried, sometimes hundreds of feet down, and formed into a loop. During winter, a refrigerant-type fluid circulating through the loop grabs the heat and transfers it into a structure’s air-handler. When air conditioning is needed in the summer, the process operates much like your refrigerator: the pump draws heat from the home’s interior and dumps it back into the Earth.

Geothermal heat pumps are cousins of regular heat pumps, which draw in hot air from outside. The difference is that geothermal is more efficient because soil temperatures, even just a few feet underground, remain fairly stable year round. Geothermal systems also have few moving parts, so they’re quiet and durable. They can be adapted to provide a home’s hot water.

Dennis Bushnell, a NASA scientist who studies renewable fuels, said that geothermal heat pumps are relied on by a fair number of homeowners and others from Virginia to the Northeastern states. People who reside in warmer Sunbelt states could especially benefit from them, he said, because the loop works best when the temperature stays above 30-degrees.

The equipment is “not exotic at all,” said Langley. “You can go on the web and buy one today.”

Now for the bad news: upfront costs are painful, sometimes twice as much as conventional heating and cooling units.

If your wallet can withstand that initial blast, one satisfied customer says the quick payback time and minimal maintenance expenses make it worthwhile.

California’s electricity crisis motivated John Sergneri to install a geothermal heat pump on his 1,280-foot tract-style home in Petaluma. It cost $40,000, approximately $15,000 more than a traditional grid-dependent system. Still, it has slashed his utility bills dramatically.

Sergneri, an information technologist, is currently renting the house while he works in Switzerland. When he returns stateside, he said he plans to install solar panels to further trim his power costs, because the ground pump and associated machinery, like many renewable systems, requires some electricity to operate.

It’s all part of what he terms a low-cost, eco-friendly “retirement plan.” Sergneri, 58, jokes it will yield a better return than his tattered 401-K.

“My goal is to be as independent as possible,” he said. “I’ve always dreamed of getting as far from the grid as possible.”

Though California isn’t offering rebates for ground heat pumps, a 30-percent federal tax credit is available.

SOLAR HOT WATER

California leads the nation in rooftop solar panels despite the fact that only about 50,000 single-family homes out of an estimated 7.7-million statewide have deployed them. (In the city of Los Angeles, a measly 1,627 homes have solar hookups with the Department of Water and Power.)

A simpler, less expensive path to convert sunrays to electricity is just beginning to catch on with solar water heaters. Officials hope two sets of incentives will pluck them out of obscurity.

Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $350-million rebate program to coax homeowners to replace their old energy-sucking units with more efficient solar-fired systems. Residential utility customers can get as much as $1,875 for swapping out their natural gas systems and $1,250 for ditching their electrically-heated tanks. The rebates phase out at the end of 2017 — or when the ratepayer-subsidized funds dry up.

Buyers can also qualify for a 30-percent renewable energy tax credit for a new solar water heater from Uncle Sam.

All told, that could amount to as much as a 55-percent subsidy for equipment that normally costs between $6,000 and $8,000, contingent on a home’s size and energy usage.

Here’s the downside: to qualify for a state rebate, homeowners have to be customers of Southern California Edison, the Southern California Gas Co., Pacific Gas & Electric or San Diego Gas & Electric.

Heating water represents the third-largest energy expense for most households, according the Department of Energy. If California’s solar water heater initiative succeeds, 585-million therms of natural gas– the equivalent of 200,000 solar units – and 150-megawatts of electricity will have been replaced with clean power, the utilities commission says.

These systems are already popular in Israel, China, Spain and other countries. Beginning this year, Hawaii is mandating that all new homes be equipped with solar hot water heaters.

“Solar water heaters are the low hanging fruit,” said Katrina Phruksukarn, solar water heating program manager with the California Center for Sustainable Energy. “They may not be as cheap as putting in a high-efficiency light bulb, but they’re about as cost effective as you’re going to get.”

Technologies vary by manufacturer. One common arrangement involves linking a storage tank to a rooftop solar array. Heat collected by those panels is used to warm up copper tubes filled with water contained just beneath dark, heat absorbing collectors. Those collectors raise the temperature of the water, which from there is pumped down and stored in a well-insulated storage tank. Back-up gas or electrical heating kicks in if the temperature falls below a certain threshold.

Steve Glenn, whose company LivingHomes, designs eco-friendly modular dwellings, has a system in his home that employs solar tubes filled with special, low-boiling point oil. When sunrays strike the tubes, they produce steam that rises and transfers some of its heat to water, which is warmed and stored in an ordinary-looking 60-gallon tank. The water is then delivered to showers and sinks. Heat radiating from the system’s piping also keeps the floors toasty.

Glenn said the solar hot water heater, photovoltaic panels and other energy-miserly features in his Santa Montica home have reduced is electric bill to the cost of a nice lunch: about $15 to $20 a month.

“I don’t have to even think about it” Glenn, 45, said. “The hot water feels like hot water. I’m not aware its sun baked, and not natural gas baked.”

BIOMASS

Another home-based renewable is an update to 19th-century prairie life. Furnaces and stoves that burn wood pellets made from sawdust, bark and other industrial byproducts, as well as corn, dried cherry pits and other organic materials are now on the market. Unlike traditional cord wood, these fuels cough out relatively little ash, soot and other harmful emissions.

Depending on the house, the biomass burners can supplement or replace a structure’s conventional heating system.

Like many renewable energy concepts, though, they are not for fence sitters. A stove or furnace, which resembles a stand-alone, glass-enclosed fireplace, can run $5,000 or more with installation. The fuels themselves also aren’t necessarily cheaper than natural gas or oil heat. A typical system eats up to three tons of them yearly.

At Floyd S. Lee Fireplace & BBQ in Pasadena, they’re just starting to sell a small fireplace for $900 that burns a clear-liquid biofuel requiring no venting. Since the unit doesn’t generate bounds of heat, it’s mainly decorative, said salesman Tom Broderick. Actual pellet-burning fireplaces have promise, he added, once retail stores can more easily secure pellets from suppliers.

“But they’re trying new things all the time,” he said. “Nobody is sticking with the old.”

As with ground heat pumps, there is no state rebate available for biofuels burners. There is a $1,500 Energy Star rebate that expires Dec. 31.

Coming down the pike is a household “bio-reactor” just being introduced in England, said NASA scientist Bushnell. It converts kitchen scraps, yard waste and sewage into electrical juice.

“All these (ideas) were possible ten years ago and are now more possible because of the pace of technologies,” said Bushnell, who works out of NASA’s Langley, VA. research-center. “Once people learn about the realities of the energy-price situation, they’ll know they have to consider adjusting how they live, including considering renewables.”

SIDEBAR STORY AND LINKS

Three years ago, the state rolled out its Go Solar California! program to dramatically boost adoption of solar power and fortify an industry devoted to it. The $3.3-billion, ratepayer-financed effort has a goal of adding 3,000 megawatts of grid-connected solar by 2016.

If that objective is met, it could spare California from having to build six new gas-fired power plants, which generate about 500-megawatts per year. The average home consumes about 10,000-kilowatts annually.

The Public Utilities Commission as part of this effort has earmarked $2.2-billlion program in rebates to encourage homeowners, businesses and non-profit agencies to install solar-photovoltaic roof panels and solar water heaters. They’re only available for customers of Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric and San Diego Gas and Electric.

So far, about 257 megawatts of new solar have come on line, the bulk of that in industry. If that doesn’t sound impressive, especially compared to Europe, it represents more than three times what was installed in the 1980s and 1990s combined. And despite the low-consumer usage, California accounts for about two-thirds of the nation’s entire installed-solar.

Officials are hoping that by the time the incentives are exhausted, generating power at home will be considered a cost-savings staple, not an extravagance. Until then, consumers’ bitterness from the 2000-2001 electricity crises and more recent recession may help forge a spirit of productive independence.

“You saw faith being lost,” said Ben Airth, who works with the Center for Sustainable Energy, a non-profit involved in California’s solar campaign. “America has been brought up on the idea of plugging into the grid through a utility and now people are seeing for themselves what they can do about producing their own electricity.”

Links to explore:

* To see federal and state-by-state incentives and rebates for home-based renewable energy, start with this database.

* For more about solar water heaters, visit this site.

* To get a taste of different home-based energy systems, check out this publication online.

* Lastly, if you assumed Los Angeles, with its Prius-driving, recycle-everything culture, is gobbling up solar faster than other regions, think again. Homeowners in San Diego and Santa Clara counties have installed more photovoltaic cells and solar water heaters than denizens of much-larger Los Angeles County. Here’s the proof.

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 …”