Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Finding innovative solutions to supplying efficient, clean, safe, renewable and reliable energy for electrical power, transportation, heating and cooling. We look at problems created from the addiction to dirty fossil fuel energy, mountaintop removal and ecosystem disruption, global climate change, severe air and water pollution, and community dislocation and pollution, Extreme methods such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tar sands, hydroelectric dams and other damaging methods and sources are examined.
The Lakota phrase, Mni Wiconi, Water is Life, has inspired a Native Nations protest against the recent approval and ongoing construction of the Dakota Access Fracked Oil Pipeline, that threatens all communities and ecosystems downstream. After military-style assaults on Native Water Protectors, construction has almost reached the Missouri River.
On May 14, thousands of people from across California came to Los Angeles to call for us to Break Free from Fossil Fuels. Jack Eidt argues the only way to do this is to reform our regulatory agencies recently captured by industry, in particular the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
On May 14, 2016 Californians will convene in Downtown L.A. for a mass action to stop oil and gas drilling in our neighborhoods. Los Angeles is home to the nation’s largest urban oil field in the United States—ground zero of California’s climate fight.
High School student Malia Street writes about her classmates from the Port of LA High School who traveled 200 miles to speak out at the hearing and rally against a plan by Phillips 66 to ship volatile and toxic tar sands crude via rail into California.
We must find cleaner, safer alternatives to these ecosystem-fouling, climate-disrupting extreme fossil fuels like tar sands and fracked oil shale, and their exploding oil trains, bursting pipelines, and accident-prone refineries.
The ongoing ecological disaster has been “temporarily controlled” in Porter Ranch, California, an affluent Los Angeles suburb. Yet, families continue to get sick, and SoCalGas/Sempra wants to oversee the testing inside of homes. While the Regional Air Quality regulators requested they close the leaking well down, the AQMD failed to listen to community demands for a permanent shut down of Aliso Canyon Storage Facility.
Los Angeles comes alive this November and December, sponsored by SoCal 350 Climate Action, in calling for global climate agreements at the upcoming UN conference in Paris. This includes the Global Climate March (Nov 29) at L.A. City Hall, the Vision L.A. Climate Action Arts Festival (Nov 30 to Dec 11), the California Nurses Association Climate Convergence (Dec 3) at Pershing Square and Building Blocks Against Climate Change (Dec 12) along Wilshire Blvd.