Heal the Bay Blog

How well do your elected representatives perform in the environmental sphere?

Find out with the California League of Conservation Voters Environmental Scorecard.

This yearly report let’s you see how your legislators voted on vital environmental legislation, from improving water quality to resisting demands for rollbacks of California’s environmental laws and protections.

Once you check your legistlators’ voting history, you can let them know you’re keeping score by contacting them via an online messaging system.

Thank you Simon Cowell.  An irate Heal the Bay member wrote a scathing e-mail encouraging us to take a stand against your ocean pollution commercial. It’s bad enough that my 12-year-old daughter Natalie is obsessed with his “American Idol” rip-off, “The X-Factor.”  (Try getting her to study when she’s sucked into the battle among Kitty, Misha B and 2 Shoes.) But now he’s doing a Verizon “X-Factor” app promo that encourages the trashing of a Malibu beach. In the spot, Cowell is seen tossing cell phones off his beachside balcony onto the shoreline while disparaging them as rubbish.

Cell phones contain a wide variety of toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, and zinc. They also can contain brominated flame retardants and phthalates. Perpetuating our throwaway culture to over 12 million viewers isn’t exactly helping the cause of ocean conservation.

Cowell ends the spot by admonishing a family on the beach to not pick up the trash.  Even the leashed puppy complies with the bombastic Brit’s orders. If Cowell gets busted for bad behavior, I hope his community service is participation in Coastal Cleanup Day for life.

The Brits are always giving us trash: Gordon Ramsay, The Osbournes, the Spice Girls, Jason Statham, soccer (just kidding on that one, sort of).  Now they’re trashing our beaches.  Wasn’t British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon spill bad enough?

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The WEFTEC water quality conference, with its acres of pumps, filters, water treatment devices and other gizmos, moved out of the L.A. Convention Center last week. But I’m still thinking about what the 20,000-person gathering of H2O nerds means for our nation’s waters.  I was asked to give three talks at the conference: one on the public view of chemicals of emerging concern in recycled water; another on the future of stormwater regulation for cities and industry; and a discussion on the greening of Los Angeles through stormwater projects and regulation.

After the debates with water professionals, I was struck by a common need:  Everyone wants greater regulatory consistency and clarity.

The current federal approach is for regulations, memos, and policies to have  a great deal of  “flexibility.” But that wiggle room means that there isn’t much incentive to improve water quality programs.  Any investor in cutting-edge water treatment technology should have the expectation that the regulatory climate will push everyone to cleaner water that is more protective of human health and aquatic life.

Without that regulatory certainty, there’s no incentive for cities or industry to buy more expensive, more effective water pollution technologies other than “doing the right thing.”  Based on the lack of progress on stormwater pollution abatement nationwide, the altruistic approach has resulted in limited success.

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The California Coastal Commission invites California students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 to submit artwork or poetry with a California coastal or marine theme to the annual Coastal Art & Poetry Contest. Up to 10 winners will be selected to win $100 gift certificates to an art supply or book store, and each winner’s sponsoring teacher will receive a $50 gift certificate for educational supplies, courtesy of Acorn Naturalists.

All winners and honorable mentions will receive tickets for their families to visit the Aquarium of the Pacific, courtesy of the Aquarium. Students may have their work featured on Commission web pages and materials, and winning entries will be exhibited throughout the state.

To be eligible for the upcoming contest, entries must be postmarked by January 31, 2012.

For rules and entry form (and helpful links for teachers and students), visit www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/poster/poster.html, call (800) Coast-4U or email coast4u@coastal.ca.gov.

Contest flyers (PDF or hard copy) are available upon request.