Daily News 3/23/17
View from Porter Ranch: Metro must go electric to avoid more natural-gas risk: Guest commentary
The debate between gas and electric has been going on for decades. But for me, the choice is simple.
As a resident of Porter Ranch for 28 years, the methane leak at the Aliso Canyon storage facility left me shaken on many levels. Besides my health and my livelihood, what was most shaken was my faith that oil and gas companies would protect the neighborhoods where they operate, and put community health and safety above their bottom lines.
On Oct. 23, 2015, the largest methane leak in U.S. history began near my home. Throughout the process, we were kept in the dark by the Southern California Gas Co., the operator of the Aliso Canyon facility. SoCalGas lied about the health threats that residents faced from mercaptins and benzene. It tried to shirk responsibilities and avoid paying for temporary housing during relocation.
After misrepresenting the safety of the wells from the beginning, SoCalGas now is trying to reopen the facility with the same claims.
Out of this experience, I learned that the gas industry is not looking out for me, for Los Angeles or for our climate.
That’s why it’s so critical that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) gets serious about switching 100 percent of Los Angeles’ buses to electric vehicles instead of continuing our dangerous reliance on natural gas.
This spring, Metro will be purchasing 1,000 new buses to replace the aging ones on its fleet. Those buses can either be clean, zero-emission electric, or they can be dirty natural gas that still pollutes our air and puts our neighborhoods — and our climate — in jeopardy.
Natural gas, otherwise known as methane, is labeled as a “near-zero emissions” fuel, and has been falsely advertised by the fossil fuel industry as a solution to climate change.
But no matter how you package it, natural gas is still a fossil fuel that brings health- and climate-harming pollution into our communities.
In Porter Ranch, we saw this play out dramatically. The children at the school where I worked had headaches and bloody noses. I fainted on campus and was carried away in an ambulance. My health still hasn’t made a comeback. Dizziness, cough, chronic migraines, and a burning nose and throat continue to keep me from living as I did before the blowout.
In communities where bus exhaust is just one of many sources of pollution — including freeways and industrial activity — the health impacts of natural gas are more nuanced. But the effects are still clearly proven by higher rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses in communities like South Los Angeles and Wilmington.
“Near-zero emissions” is not good enough to make measurable improvement for their health.
Like the crumbling natural-gas infrastructure at Aliso Canyon and around the state, natural gas’s reputation as a clean alternative is obsolete, especially with affordable and reliable electric alternatives already in the market.
From a climate perspective, studies show that methane leakages in various parts of the supply chain, from drilling to storage (like what we saw at SoCalGas’s Aliso Canyon storage facility), make the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas comparable to diesel, not better.
So why are we wasting time investing money in false solutions that only perpetuate our pollution problems and harm our communities’ health?
If we miss this opportunity to make a critical switch in how we power the public transit lifelines of our city, we risk a decades-long delay in cleaning our air and mitigating the impacts of climate change.
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We can’t let what happened to me and my neighbors in Porter Ranch happen to anyone else. The oil and gas industry has been causing environmental and health disasters for decades, and more “accidents” are virtually guaranteed.
It makes no sense to continue relying on dangerous natural gas when the technology to power our zero-emissions future is already here. It’s time Metro gets serious about bringing it to our city now. We can’t afford to waste another decade and millions of dollars by buying anything less than zero-emissions electric buses.
Angelenos deserve clean air, and that means we deserve zero.
Patricia Larcara, a retired special-education assistant, is a resident of the San Fernando Valley community of Porter Ranch.
Daily News 1/31/17
Aliso Canyon gas field should stay closed as questions remain open: Guest commentary
What caused the blowout at Aliso Canyon discovered in October 2015? Fifteen months later, we still don’t know.
And yet, without any answers as to why that well failed, state regulators and the Southern California Gas Co. are poised to re-open the natural-gas storage field in February, with the tired threat of blackouts hanging over our heads.
There is no rush to re-open Aliso Canyon. In the winter of 2015, with the facility still spewing gas, and a community sickened, the company warned of blackouts. Nothing happened. Last summer, with the field sealed, again we heard the familiar blackout cry.
Instead, what we saw was a major buildout of local clean energy and storage projects, creating good jobs, protecting ratepayers with a more resilient and diversified energy system, and rendering blackout fears moot. Our regulators, entrepreneurs and utilities snapped into action and rose to the call of duty.
The crisis at Aliso, and our old way of storing energy through underground gas storage, has given rise to a new way. The world’s largest battery storage project will come online this week, right here in Southern California, which came in under budget, ahead of schedule, with zero emissions, contributing to a new diversity in our energy mix that will reduce our reliance on a single source of fuel for our heating and power needs.
We can and should incorporate more clean energy storage into our system to reduce risk — not just to residents of the North San Fernando Valley, living in the shadow of Aliso Canyon, but to all ratepayers in Southern California who will benefit from a more resilient, more diversified, cleaner grid.
Meanwhile, the root cause of the Aliso incident remains unknown. In fact, the investigation hasn’t even begun. And our community remains in limbo.
While emergency conditions appear to be behind us, there is no guarantee that a leak won’t happen again.
We need to heat our homes in the winter and use air conditioning in the summer, and we trust public utilities like SoCalGas to meet those needs. But the Aliso incident shattered that trust.
The only way to rebuild that trust is through transparency and accountability from both the Gas Company and state regulators.
That’s why we are committed to advancing Senate Bill 146: to require California regulators and independent safety experts to get to the bottom of what happened at Aliso Canyon before considering the field’s re-opening. Our hope is that this emergency legislation won’t be necessary, and that state agencies and the Gas Company will adopt this common-sense approach on their own.
But based on the Gas Company’s saber-rattling over gas shortages and blackouts, and without any concrete evidence to justify the need for emergency withdrawal, it looks as if they will ask Californians to take them at their word.
The strongest path to rebuilding public trust and getting our community back to normal is for state regulators and energy suppliers to slow down, get to the bottom of why the blowout occurred, and come back to the public with answers.
We must also look to the future for our energy reliability needs, not to the past.
A public meeting with state regulators to discuss the proposal to re-open Aliso Canyon is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 1, and Thursday, Feb. 2, from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Hilton in Woodland Hills. We will attend the Wednesday night meeting.
All residents may attend or submit opinions in advance. More information can be found on the California Department of Conservation website, www.conservation.ca.gov, or by calling 916-322-3080
Henry Stern, D-Calabasas, is a member of the California state Senate, representing the 27th District. Kathryn Barger is a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing the 5th District.