The LookOut is a monthly digest of climate-related issues and events taking place in Humboldt County (or nearby).
The city of Blue Lake was approached more than a year ago by a developer interested in installing a battery energy storage system on the site of the abandoned and decrepit biomass plant. Cleaning up the site, including soil remediation, and tearing down the building was reportedly part of the deal, but the project didn’t get the necessary traction. Now it looks as though Blue Lake may at least get rid of the mountain of logs that has been moldering onsite for at least ten years.
Hill Construction has offered to haul away the wood, two 20-yard truck loads per day. The contents of each truck will have first been spread out and dried in the sun before loading. At that rate, the job may take years, but the city will bear no financial responsibility for it. A contract has not yet been drawn up.
According to a city staff member at the last Blue Lake city council meeting, the destination for that wood will be “another plant” that will buy it from the hauler. This must refer to another biomass plant—probably the one in Scotia. It’s too bad that wood so old couldn’t be composted instead of burned, but there are no large-scale compost operations nearby. Besides, a compost center would be unlikely to buy the wood, and money is needed to pay for the hauling.
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Funded by the California Energy Commission, Schatz Energy Center is pioneering an important innovation. One potential drawback of floating offshore wind turbines is the danger of entanglement for whales and other marine life. Researchers say that mooring lines and submerged electrical cables pose very little direct threat of entanglement, but ghost fishing gear does get caught. Fishing gear is already dangerous, particularly for whales, sea lions and leatherback turtles. Snagged on cables beneath wind turbines, this abandoned gear could concentrate entanglements in wind energy areas.
Schatz is designing sensors and developing detection algorithms to monitor when entanglements happen. Because of the time gap between detection and a possible response, freeing the animal is unlikely. However, data will help researchers figure out how to avoid and minimize the risk.
Thank you, Schatz Energy Center
Last Chance Grade on 101 south of Crescent City has been falling into the ocean for decades. Caltrans can’t shore it up any longer. The best solution seems to be to abandon three and a half miles of twisting, sliding highway in favor of rerouting the road through a 6,000 foot tunnel. Drilling the tunnel will require cutting down around 144 mature trees in Redwood National and State Parks, including 16 old-growth redwoods. Some of them approach nine feet in diameter.
To mitigate this serious collateral damage, Caltrans proposes to fund restoration work on approximately 670 forested acres nearby. This may sound fair until you reflect that the proposed project will likely cost less than $3 million, which is a tiny fraction of the agency’s budget dedicated to the project. Both EPIC and Save the Redwoods League are asking for greater mitigation for the damage. Click here to read SRL’s press release.
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One out of five old growth redwoods slated for removal has been saved in the Redway area. The Planning Commission refused to grant a special permit to the property owner to cut down the last of the old-growth redwoods he had deemed a hazard.
Despite neighbors’ objections that living in a Q-Zone means a certain degree of protection for trees, four were cut down on the strength of a Cal Fire forester’s assessment. They appealed to the county to intervene, but the county said Cal Fire’s authority superseded the county’s authority. This turned out not to be true as the county has belatedly recognized.
The Planning Commission proceeding turned on the question of whether or not the fifth old-growth tree was truly a hazard to the house on the property, which the owner had bought for his mother. Most of the people who testified at the meeting questioned the forester’s assessment and were suspicious that it was a good old boy deal because the property owner, Robert Scarlett, is himself a Cal Fire employee. The commissioners had asked to see evidence backing up the verdict that the tree was an imminent hazard. No such evidence was made available. Scarlett’s lawyer denied that any great profit had resulted from the downed redwoods.
A detailed account of the Planning Commission meeting can be read here.
350 Humboldt Happenings
We’ll meet at HumBrews for the July Solidarity Gathering at 5:30 on July 13 instead of having a general meeting. (Sorry for not breaking that more gently.) At this public event we plan to enlist support for the Regional Climate Action Plan and raise money for Flip the Vote. Climate Action Campaign folks from the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship will also be there to make a presentation and share some fun with us. Hungry and thirsty attendees are particularly welcome since a portion of food and drink sales will flow into our anemic coffers.
Repair Cafe takes place on the second Sunday of every month. That’s July 12 from 10am to 2pm at the Adorni Center in Eureka, 1011 Waterfront Dr. Bring stuff that needs fixing—electronics, clothing, jewelry, lamps, small furniture and appliances, etc. If you’re interested in volunteering to be a fixer or help direct people, contact [email protected]
SIGNS OF FASCISM is an action taking place around the country to call attention to the precarious state of our democracy. Click here to view a great example. Advocates for Single Payer (formerly known as Health Care for All) recently held a similar action in Eureka and would like to organize more of them in both Eureka and Arcata if people are interested in participating. Contact Patty Harvey at [email protected] or text (805 844-6655) if you’re interested. Times, dates and location to be decided when enough people volunteer.
Reconnect Arcata Project – I haven’t checked this out yet, but it sounds interesting for Arcatans and perhaps other people who might want to introduce something similar in their own communities where neighborhoods have been divided by highways. The goal of this project is to reconnect neighborhoods by ensuring safe routes and intermodal transportation between both sides of a highway. Benefits include greater safety, environmental justice, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The wildlife benefits as well. Learn more here.
More News and a Pep Talk
A presentation about the proposed heavy-lift marine terminaltook place at the Arcata Community Center on June 24. The terminal is needed to provide critical on-shore assembly, staging and support for an offshore wind farm that still sits on the planning horizon even though the Trump administration has eliminated federal funds for it. Not only that, but the feds are using taxpayer funds to buy out developers’ leases, including, so far, one on the California coast. The state has provided funding for the marine terminal to continue its planning process. More than twenty consultants are working on its design.
As the presenters kept reminding the audience, this proposed project is huge for our community in both its potential benefits and impacts. Avoidance of negative impacts is the ideal, but some will be unavoidable. Minimizing them is next best, but even minimized impacts might affect to some degree aquaculture and fishing in the bay. Dredging may cause temporary turbidity that could affect the marine ecology. Noise and lights issues loom for surrounding neighborhoods and the island of Tuluwat, sacred to the Wiyot. Whatever cannot be avoided or reasonably minimized will be mitigated by a restoration project on a different site.
Impacts of the project would also include beneficial ones such as cleanup of the project site, a large brownfield once occupied by a timber mill. Other benefits would be financial—workforce development that would give preference to tribal members, residents of the Samoa Peninsula, and local high school graduates. Many other non-inherent community benefits are being negotiated by the developers and the harbor district. But the biggest benefit would be the energy itself produced from wind turbines twenty miles from shore. Large-scale, clean renewable energy is our only hope to curb the worst effects of climate change.
A seven person panel at the presentation assembled to answer questions from the audience. One of its members, Lonyx Landry, the Coordinator of the Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering Program at Cal Poly Humboldt, also participated in the Pacific Offshore Wind Summit in Long Beach earlier this year. That experience helped to inform his cautiously optimistic view of the future of offshore wind, which he expressed in an editorial for Lost Coast Outpost. You can read it here.
A Notice of Preparation will soon herald the beginning of the CEQA process. First the NOP starts a thirty day public process for saying what factors and concerns should be covered by the draft environmental review [DEIR]. That document should be released some time next year and will trigger a forty-five day period of public comment and questions on its contents. Each of these concerns must be responded to in the final environmental report [FEIR] before it is adopted by the Planning Commission. That was your review of the California Environmental Quality Act [CEQA].
A Little Hope for Hope-Hungry Activists
Thank you, Bright Saver
The global stampede to build energy-gobbling data centers threatens to whisk away the last drops of hope for us climate activists. How will we ever get carbon emissions under control? Yet a few interesting developments enliven the doomscape.
In their desperation for more energy, utilities and electricity providers are finding innovative strategies that make the most of the grid and power resources we already have. This article about virtual power plants describes one important strategy. Increasingly, home energy storage systems are virtually yoked together to sell the grid critical amounts of energy during peak usage. It’s a triumph of distributed efficiency that prevents peaker power plants from firing up to supply expensive and dirty electricity. The home systems then recharge during the night when energy is plentiful and cheap.
California legislation this year—SB 905, for instance—would require utilities to make the most out of the existing grid by reforming some of their practices instead of building new infrastructure and passing the costs to ratepayers. Other bills would require some industrial users to shift their usage away from certain hours of the day when households are hitting peak demand.
Some tech giants are planning to build out renewable arrays to power their desired data centers, for the truth is that renewable technologies are the most rapidly scalable and least expensive ways to meet surging energy demand. Of course the Trump administration stubbornly continues to be a lethal and powerful foe of most forms of renewable energy, but the sheer absurdity of its position is striking more and more members of Congress. They might even dare to complain one of these days.
One cheering sign is widespread resistance to data centers, thanks to the affordability crisis. According to Gallup almost 75% of the US public opposes more data centers being built in their area. This widespread opposition seems to be a political opportunity to unite people from across the political spectrum to consider energy in a more holistic light.
The affordability crisis is also galvanizing people to stand up to utilities and demand accountability. SB 905, the same bill I mentioned earlier, plus many other bills flooding the California legislature this year, puts forth many bold demands to attempt to reform investor-owned utilities.
One last hopeful development. SB 868 is making its way through the twisty halls of the California legislature. The Plug and Play Solar Act may make solar panels hanging off balconies and propped up against fences and walls a ubiquitous sight. Other states have introduced their own versions, and Utah already passed theirs. The ability to buy a few panels and just plug them in without doing more than simply registering them with your utility can transform the energy landscape. Renters are a huge new market for solar power. People who own their own homes but still hesitate to fork over as much as $30,000 can enjoy the benefits of making some of their own energy at a much more reasonable cost.
This rapid mainstreaming of solar will surely bring down costs for standard rooftop arrays as well, which are approximately three times more in the US than in Australia, and twice as much as in Germany.
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