Landfill with burning trash piles. Image by Collab MediaOPINION – California has long been a leader in the fight against climate change, but in the crucial battle to reduce methane emissions from landfills, we are falling behind. It’s time for the California Air Resources Board to address this problem before it’s too late.
A landfill gas collection site in Sunnyvale. (Photo: Michael Vi, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Reducing the amount of organic waste that is buried in California landfills is an environmental imperative. As state policy mandates, something has to be done to choke back the production of methane, the gas that is generated when table scraps, yard clippings and other organic materials decompose underground.
A portion of a plant that produces gas through the breakdown of organic waste. (Photo: Bertold Werkman, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Let’s play a game: what would you do with 25 million tons of organic waste annually? Here are a few tidbits to spark your imagination: Organic waste includes food and green waste, landscaping and pruning waste, lumber, fiber, sewage and sludges.
Electrical power transmitted to a large urban area. (Photo: urbans, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Powering our state with entirely clean energy is not a pipe dream. At a time when the Trump administration is making harmful and backward decisions on our climate and energy future, Senate Bill 100 presents a golden opportunity for California to lead the nation. California already sources over a quarter of our electricity from wind and solar sources, empowering us to reach 50 percent renewable energy well before 2030.
Aliso Canyon in Southern California, site of an unprecedented methane gas leak. (Photo: trekandshoot, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Aliso Canyon was the biggest methane well blowout in U.S. history, and we still don’t know why it happened. The California Public Utilities Commission and Brown administration regulators just reopened the facility without the necessary environmental and safety reviews, so we have no way of knowing if it will happen again.
A hazy day in the Los Angeles Basin, New Year's Day, 2015. (Photo:Trekandshoot, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Gov. Jerry Brown has called Donald Trump’s election the proverbial “heart attack” to get California off of the equivalent of cigarettes — climate-destroying fossil fuels. But for Brown to be the foil to Trump’s anti-environmental policies, it’s going to take a lot more than launching California’s own climate-tracking satellite.