Today, 40 years after the first Earth Day, the Bay Area by most measures is a much less polluted, environmentally healthier place than it was in 1970.
The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. A green technology and renewable-energy boom is under way in Silicon Valley. There are more acres of protected parkland and fewer toxic emissions from industry.
Yet during the next 40 years, the region will face a host of daunting and expensive problems as the spirit of bipartisanship that marked the environmental movement of the early 1970s has given way to gridlock and budget woes.
The largest environmental challenges for the Bay Area now, experts say, generally center on four critical areas: water supply, transportation, global warming and population growth.
To tackle them by 2050, the region might gain inspiration from efforts over the past four decades.
“There’s been a tremendous improvement in the air, water and land quality over the last 40 years,” said Jared Blumenfeld, administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in San Francisco. “We often are kind of paralyzed by the headlines which make it appear the end is nigh and every environmental indicator is off the charts. But most of the trend lines are going in the right direction.”
Consider: When former U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin — a 1939 graduate of San Jose State University — founded Earth Day on April 22, 1970, there was no BART service and no city recycling programs in the Bay Area. There was no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act and no Endangered Species Act. No Coastal Commission or EPA. DDT was sprayed regularly. Leaded gasoline ran cars. Residents regularly backed up station wagons full of trash and dumped them into wetlands around the bay. There was even a whaling station in Richmond until 1972 whose ships harpooned gray and humpback whales just outside the Golden Gate to make Kal Kan dog food.
And smog? Terrible. Back in 1970, the Bay Area’s nine counties recorded 35 days on which smog exceeded federal health standards. By 2008 there were zero days, under the same standard. A new car in 1970 spewed 20 times more pollution than 2010 models do, while getting half the gas mileage. And toxic releases from factories are down 98 percent in Santa Clara County in the past 20 years, down 87 percent in Alameda County, 84 percent in Contra Costa County and 81 percent in San Mateo County, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory database.
Tough laws, and technology — from better scrubbers on industrial smokestacks to catalytic converters on cars — made it possible.
“A huge part has been innovation,” said Blumenfeld. “I think that has come as a result of having stringent laws.”
Looking to the future, four major areas are likely to loom large.
Water supply
Most cities in California, including San Jose, receive about 15 inches of rain a year. In the 20th century, the state and federal governments built the largest series of dams and canals in the world to move water from the forests and Sierra snowfields of Northern California to the farms and cities to the south.
But progress has a price. Fish species, including salmon and steelhead trout, have crashed, blocked by dams, chewed up by pumps. One thousand miles of old earthen levees in San Francisco Bay’s delta are at risk of collapse in a big earthquake.
Key pipes for the Hetch Hetchy system run over the Hayward Fault. And state hydrologists project that the Sierra snowpack, the source of much of the state’s drinking water, will shrink as California’s climate continues to warm. How to balance the needs of farms, which use 80 percent of the water people consume in California, with the needs of cities and wildlife, is a huge challenge.
“You’ve got a water supply whose source is susceptible to climate change crossing a very unstable part of terrain, one that is likely to have a dramatic earthquake,” said Jeff Koseff, a Stanford University professor of engineering and co-director of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “We have almost a perfect storm coming.”
Population growth
Driven largely by high immigration rates and, until recently, jobs, there are now 7.4 million people living in the nine-county Bay Area. Put another way, since the first Earth Day in 1970, the Bay Area has grown by 2.8 million people — the equivalent of adding the combined populations of present-day Denver, Portland, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Sacramento to the region — bringing huge problems with sprawl and traffic. By 2050, the Bay Area population is projected to increase by an additional 2.9 million people, according to the state Department of Finance.
All those people need homes, water, food, energy and a way to get around.
Transportation
“An electric car sits stalled in the same traffic as a Hummer,” said Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents many of the area’s leading employers. “While we’re making sure our cars are cleaner, we need to make sure people have options to cars.”
Guardino said his organization will continue its push to expand BART to San Jose and Santa Clara, construction of high-speed rail, ferries, more compact new development and other measures. Funding, he said, will have to come from new sales taxes, gas taxes, vehicle registration fees and tolls for single drivers using carpool lanes.
“In Silicon Valley we are used to investing,” he said. “At a typical tech company, 10 to 15 percent goes into R&D. We have to invest in our infrastructure the same way.”
Energy and climate
The 10 hottest years since the modern temperature records began in the 1880s all have occurred since 1995, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Continued warming will mean more forest fires and droughts for California. And since 1900, the San Francisco Bay has risen 8 inches. By 2050, although estimates vary, bay waters are projected to keep rising as the world warms, perhaps another foot or more. That could mean more flooding during storms in low-lying places like Foster City, San Francisco International Airport and Alviso.
In recent years, investors have poured billions into Silicon Valley companies making solar panels, biofuels and other alternatives to fossil fuels. Art Rosenfeld, a UC Berkeley physicist emeritus and former member of the California Energy Commission, notes that the greatest gains are likely to come from efficiency, not breathtaking technologies. With steadily improving state standards for windows, appliances, duct work and other items, today Californians use 40 percent less electricity per capita than the national average.
Efforts such as requiring the roofs of all commercial buildings to be painted white to reduce air conditioning costs, modernizing the power grid, and retrofitting existing buildings with better insulation could reduce the state’s per-capita electricity use another 40 percent.
“The last 40 years have shown what we’ve been able to achieve,” Blumenfeld said. “I think we can build on those successes and really catapult ourselves to a more sustainable future.”
By Paul Rogers
Source:www.mercurynews.com
