California voters will decide whether or not to legalize marijuana for recreational use this November. If voters approve Prop 64, the state will follow the lead of states like Washington, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon to make it legal beyond medicinal usage.
The vote will carry major implications for our criminal justice and public health systems, as well as for our environment, among other issues.
I’ll be hosting a discussion of the proposed initiative tonight at 7pm on “City Visions” on KALW radio, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. You can stream it and learn more here.
My guests will include:
- Andrew Acosta, spokesperson for the No on 64 Campaign, also Founder and President of Acosta Consulting with over 20 years of experience in issue advocacy, campaign management, and public relations.
- Jason Kinney, spokesperson for the Yes on 64 Campaign, also Principal of California Strategies, LLC. Kinney was named to Capitol Weekly’s Top 100 “Most Powerful Political Players in California” and was lead strategist for the Gavin Newsom for Lieutenant Governor Campaign.
- Patrick Murphy, Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and co-author of the PPIC’s April 2016 report entitled “Regulating Marijuana in California.”
Hope you can tune in! I’ll post the audio after the show.
UPDATE: the audio is available here.
With California’s big primary election tomorrow, I’ll be hosting a live roundtable discussion on KALW Radio’s “City Visions” tonight at 7pm on 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area, KALW.org for live streaming.
Guests include:
- Mark DiCamillo, Director of The Field Poll
- Jason McDaniel, Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University
- James Lance Taylor, Professor and Director of the African American studies program at the University of San Francisco
We’ll cover presidential politics, the senate race, local elections, and more!
UPDATE: Audio now available here.
For those in the Bay Area, I’ll be at the Bay Area Book Festival at 2pm on Sunday in Berkeley on behalf of KALW radio and the program “City Visions.”
From KALW’s info on the festival:
We…invite you to come by KALW’s booth on “Literary Lane” on Addison Street, between Milvia & Shattuck, to meet some of the people you hear on Local Public Radio:
Saturday, June 4th
10:00am Judy Silber, producer of The Spiritual Edge
12:00pm Edwin Okong’o, host of Africa Mix
1:00pm “Radio Poets” from AmericaSCORES Bay Area
2:00pm Steven Short, Crosscurrents cannabis correspondent & Dana Rodriguez, host of Minds Over Matter
3:00pm Jen Chien, Crosscurrents editor and host of Sights & Sounds
4:00pm Chuck Finney, host of Your Legal Rights
5:00pm Marty Nemko, host of Work with Marty Nemko
Sunday, June 5th
11:30am Angie Coiro, host of In Deep with Angie Coiro
12:30pm Barbara Lane, host of Binah and Director of Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF
1:30pm Lauren Schiller, host of Inflection Point
2:00pm Ethan Elkind, co-host of City Visions
3:00pm Ashleyanne Krigbaum, KALW’s afternoon host & producer of The Spot
4:00pm Kevin Vance, host of A Patchwork Quilt
Hope to see you there!
Last night we had a spirited discussion on KALW’s “City Visions” on the prospects of turning the mountains of trash we’d otherwise send to landfills into energy. You can listen to the audio here.
My takeaway is that despite all our efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle, there will always be some (hopefully small) percentage of garbage that we simply cannot avoid sending to landfills. Some of that waste may be too complicated or expensive to reuse, from pizza boxes with glue to “urine-stained carpets,” as Rob White from Sierra Energy pointed out.
San Francisco is one of the national leaders in waste reduction policies, as Jack Macy described, and is able to address about 80-90% of its waste. But there’s a remaining 10 percent that may dwindle further but will still be shipped to landfills somewhere. At this point, hundreds of tons of garbage a day exit San Francisco for landfills.
I understand the concern from environmental advocates that waste-to-energy facilities have polluted local communities and that the promised results haven’t been delivered.
But as we argue in “Wasting Opportunities,” technologies have improved, and the state has an overriding interest in trying to figure out how to reduce landfilling and meet renewable energy goals. It would benefit all stakeholders to engage in a process to determine under what standards it might make sense to deploy some of these higher-performing technologies.
Not all waste-to-energy technologies will make the cut, but with proper, evidence-based analysis, some may shake out and provide environmental benefits. At that point, we can address the siting concerns to ensure low-income communities of color are not overburdened by deployment.
But if we don’t take action soon, the status quo on trash is simply not sustainable.
King tide at the San Francisco Embarcadero
Climate change presents a lot of uncertainty for our future. But one of the climate impacts that scientists predict with confidence is sea level rise, as the ice to our north and south melts with a warmer global climate.
The ocean has already risen eight inches in the past century, and the median scientific estimate is that it will rise another four feet or so by 2100. But a subset of scientists thinks that estimate is too low. Some think that the sea level rise will be closer to 12 feet.
Regardless, even a few feet of ocean rise will cause havoc on our coastal cities and infrastructure. The costs will be enormous, as we glimpsed with the storm surge caused by Superstorm Sandy in the New York City area.
To discuss how the San Francisco Bay Area will adapt to this likely future, I’ll be hosting a City Visions radio show on KALW 91.7 FM tonight at 7pm. Please tune in and join the conversation. I’ll post a link to the archived broadcast tomorrow.
UPDATE: The broadcast is now archived here.
Time to build another one of these?
BART under the San Francisco Bay is crowded and a major choke point for regional transportation. Monday night I guest hosted a discussion on City Visions on KALW radio on the prospects of building a second rail tube. The audio is now available here.
Some big picture points that emerged:
- The exact route is undefined and would hinge on further study;
- Further study would also be required to determine what kind of rail technology (BART, high speed rail, Caltrain, or a mix?) would be accommodated in the tube; and
- A potential bond issue this fall to expand and invest in BART would also have some funding to do this study.
From my perspective, additional rail capacity under the Bay is needed. But the region shouldn’t fall into the trap of putting all the transportation eggs in that basket. Even if the project moves forward, it will (sadly) take decades to plan and build.
We should be putting our energy now into figuring out how to make better use of existing capacity and determining if there are more cost-effective ways to move more people across the bay. As Rebecca Saltzman discussed on the show, one relatively simple way would be to convert a lane on the Bay Bridge to bus-only.
And the potential bike path from Treasure Island to San Francisco could also be a relatively good bargain for moving people, if it can then connect to the existing bike path on the eastern span. Matier and Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle reported on design options for it just this morning.
Meanwhile, if the second transbay tube does move forward, I hope there is serious consideration of policy reforms that could speed up the construction and lower the price tag. Because even with other intermediate fixes, the regional transportation problem will only get worse as the population grows.
For those who missed my interview on KALW radio on Monday night, you can listen to it here. The discussion covered the history of the waterfront (did you know that much of the port was built on old abandoned ships from the Gold Rush era?), the agency structure of the Port of San Francisco, and the likely impacts of climate change on the waterfront in the coming century.
We also talked about the recent development battles there, particularly the impact of Proposition B, a San Francisco voter initiative that passed earlier this year that requires any project developer that seeks to build above current height limits to get the approval of all San Francisco voters.
The state is suing to invalidate the measure though, arguing that the waterfront is state land and that San Francisco voters cannot veto what gets built there. I hope the state is successful, because this kind of ballot-box, project-by-project planning is detrimental to sound, comprehensive planning. And I also agree that the whole state has an interest in the waterfront, not just well-heeled neighbors in the city who don’t want their views blocked.
I’ll be on KALW radio tonight at 7pm (91.7 FM in the Bay Area, internet for everyone else) discussing the future of development along San Francisco’s waterfront. The implications go well-beyond San Francisco: waterfront development battles have brought out neighborhood opponents in full force, reflecting a widespread dynamic of local politics thwarting development projects in our existing cities and towns.
And the waterfront will be ground zero for sea level rise over this century and beyond. How will cities start to plan for the ongoing climate impacts?
More information on KALW’s website here, as well as an eventual link to the audio.
It was a fun show on KALW radio yesterday. You can listen to it here. We got a number of questions comparing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to electric vehicles. Marc Geller, my fellow panelist, was quite adamant that battery electrics offer better environmental and cost benefits overall, given the expense of building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure and the energy it takes to produce the hydrogen fuel (not to mention the carbon footprint of that process).
People also asked about the toxic footprint of the battery, from creation to disposal. I’m always happy to dispel misconceptions about EVs, as it’s a new technology and even educated, well-meaning people have heard misleading information about EVs. The toxic footprint is one of them. First of all, battery-manufacturing impacts pale in comparison to the offsetting pollution from driving EVs compared to fossil fuel vehicles. Second, the batteries can be completely recycled (as hybrid batteries currently are) and even repurposed to go back into the vehicle or used in other applications, like home energy storage.
Another myth is that electricity is as dirty as oil. Not true. In about 16% of the country, the grid is quite dirty, and driving a hybrid car would be better than an EV. However, besides those places (like Wyoming), in the vast majority of the country, you are far better off driving an EV.
You can listen to the show for more. One interesting note, the moderator was David Onek, who happens to be the son-in-law of Michael Dukakis, who happens to have been my instructor at UCLA and who influenced my research and conclusions in Railtown. So it’s a small world, and it all seems to boil down (in this case) to electrifying transportation, from rail to EVs.
