The recent chemical plant emergency in Garden Grove should be a wake-up call for all of Southern California, home to the de facto nuclear waste dump site at San Onofre, just south of San Clemente. In Garden Grove, the threat from a tank holding roughly 7,000 gallons of a common hazardous industrial liquid — about one-third the volume of a typical backyard swimming pool —…
September 30, 2025 may mark the day communities in Southern California first took initiative to protect themselves from deadly nuclear waste stranded indefinitely at San Onofre. With Irvine Mayor Larry Agran spearheading the effort, a Special Study Session of the Irvine City Council convened on Sept. 30 to address the risks of 3.6 million pounds of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel (SNF) stored in temporary…
What do beer, oysters, table salt, air & tap water have in common? They’re all ways humans are ingesting microplastics, tiny bits of plastic waste ubiquitous in oceans, lakes and rivers and even soil and air. Wildlife as diverse as whales, seabirds, fish and zooplankton are polluted by ingesting plastic debris. It’s naïve to assume that humans, sharing the same global environment and eating at…
Mankind has only 12 years left to make unprecedented cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if we want to stave off unimaginably catastrophic effects of runaway global warming. This is the warning detailed in October’s report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the recognized global climate authority which represents the investigations of hundreds of climate scientists and 195 participating nations. A…
Although burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming, fossil fuels could also be driving climate change via a completely different mechanism involving ocean plastic debris and tiny, bioluminescent fish living hundreds of meters beneath the ocean’s surface. Lanternfish (aka myctophids) are only a few inches long typically but so ubiquitous that they account for over half the ocean’s total fish-mass. They are…
I fancy myself an environmentalist. I recycle, backyard compost, have rooftop solar, rarely use AC or heat, drive a hybrid, don’t have a lawn and eat vegetarian. Yet the truth is I am as responsible for climate change as the next guy. Here’s why. Doing those things makes me feel good about myself, but they don’t move the world measurably closer to solving the climate…
The City of Escondido should do what 46 other local jurisdictions across the country have done, pass a resolution telling Congress to step up and lead the rest of the world in addressing the crisis of global climate change — Sarah Mosko Although President Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this is no time for the 70 percent of…