California

New Homes in Lancaster, California Required to Produce Solar Energy

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Lancaster, California has nearly half a million citizens and they want to reduce their carbon footprint. Their most recent step to being a green city is a world’s first as far as I know: every new residential development in the city is required to produce energy using the sun.

“However, to truly establish ourselves as the Alternative Energy Capital of the World, we must continue to take a progressive approach. I would like to commend our Planning Commission for this innovative revision of the Residential Zones, which will rapidly advance us towards becoming a net-zero City in record time.”

Read more at Solar Tribune.

Marijuana Decriminalization Lowers Youth Crime Rate

- Adam Clare

Marijuana has been recently decriminalized in a few states in the USA, and based off of data from California the overall rate of youth arrests will drop dramatically. This is good news because now so many young lives won’t be destroyed for participating in using a drug that has negligible health effects (way less than alcohol) and is an insanely costly law to enforce. In Canada, the majority of Canadians encourage decriminalization for similar reasons.

The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice (CJCJ) recently released a policy briefing with an analysis of arrest data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center. The briefing, “California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low,” identifies a new state marijuana decriminalization law that applies to juveniles, not just adults, as the driving force behind the plummeting arrest totals.

After the new pot law went into effect in January 2011, simple marijuana possession arrests of California juveniles fell from 14,991 in 2010 to 5,831 in 2011, a 61 percent difference, the report by CJCJ senior research fellow Mike Males found.

Read more at AlterNet

California High Speed Rail is Green

- Adam Clare

Trains are way more efficient than cars and trucks when it comes to transporting people and goods, yet in North America, trains are often shunned for more wasteful transportation systems. This negative attitude towards sustainability is changing, notably California citizens voted for a high speed rail line in the state.

Opponents to economic and environmental efficiencies argued that the high speed rail line would be too expensive to build. It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that California’s new rail system is better for everybody!

While several competing proposals are on the table for what the system will look like once it’s completed, high-speed rail promises to be more environmentally friendly in several ways. Cars and planes, for example, run on fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The extraction and refining process also emits pollutants. High-speed trains, however, run on electricity, which produces no greenhouse gases at the point of use. Pollutants become an issue for high-speed rail at the power plants generating the electricity. The plants may burn fossil fuels. However, the study’s authors note that the number of renewable energy plants, which produce no greenhouse gases, will continue to grow in California as the high-speed rail system is built. Hydroelectric power produces the bulk of the electricity for the Swiss High-Speed Rail network.
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The new study’s findings track closely with research commissioned in 2009 by seven of Europe’s leading high-speed rail systems. “Generally, what you tend to see around the rest of the world is a similar pattern where high-speed rail does have a lower environmental footprint than the automobile or aircraft,” Chester said.

Read more here.

More Women Riding Bikes in Southern California

- Adam Clare

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Regular readers probably know that bicycles are the best form of transportation imaginable (I may be biased). It’s always good to read of efforts to get more people in North America riding bicycles, and to make things even better there’s a group of women in southern California that encourages other women to ride.

Balmer founded WOBSoCal because of stories just like hers. She recalls her own tentative return to cycling: “I was afraid I would ride too far and then be too tired to get back; then I’d feel humiliated.” Once she finally relented, her first ride was in a Christmas parade, “which was a great seduction.” Her fears were instantly replaced by her newfound passion.

“Whether you have to or want to choose a bike for transportation, we want to celebrate it,” said Balmer. Not only is biking fun, it is also healthy, convenient and affordable; so why aren’t more women riding?

Read more at Momentum.

California Bans Shark Fin Soup

- Adam Clare

There are tons of reason to ban shark fin soup, and it’s not just because it’s cruel to sharks.

“Sharks have been around for nearly 400 million years, and could be wiped out in a single human generation due to an increasing demand for their fins,” said Knights. ”Fisheries regulation on the ground has utterly failed to reduce overfishing — market approaches like this are crucial.”

Fins from up to 73 million sharks per year are used to make shark fin soup, a vastly popular Asian delicacy. Captured at sea and hauled on deck, the sharks are often still alive while their fins are sliced off. Because shark meat is not considered as valuable as shark fin, the maimed animals are tossed overboard to drown or bleed to death. The process is called shark finning, a wasteful and cruel practice still legal in much of the world.

So in this context it is great to see that shark fin soup has been banned in yet another part of the world. Some people are afraid of sharks (I blame Jaws) yet sharks are vital to a healthy and function ocean ecosystem.

A hat tip to WildAid, where you can read the rest of the article.

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