California is a dirty place — and it’s not just because of the sleazy, hedonistic Hollywood culture in which Harvey Weinstein thrived.
The dirtiness of California might surprise the outsider. After all, the Golden State has been making a very big show of its push to phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, putting residents at the mercy of less reliable sources of electrical generation. It may cost a lot more, and the electric police cars may not be able to keep up with the bad guys, but at least they’re cleaning up the planet. Aren’t they?
Well, maybe not. A new letter from EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to Gov. Gavin Newsom suggests otherwise. As California officials go through the motions of fighting climate change, they are failing to enforce the environmental laws that guarantee the basics — such as a clean environment and clean drinking water — for their residents.
Wheeler, whose agency has for decades delegated much of its enforcement authority to state environmental regulators, warned Newsom that California is dropping the ball in a number of areas. For example, San Francisco, as one of the few major cities with a combined sewer system (handling both storm runoff and sewage), has allegedly been negligent in maintaining its system. This has caused backups into residences and businesses, which is bad enough in terms of human health, but the city’s aged sewers are also discharging more than a billion gallons of combined sewage and runoff into San Francisco Bay annually.
“[A]lthough San Francisco’s combined sewer outfalls discharge to sensitive waters, these discharges do not receive biological treatment,” Wheeler wrote. Rather, he notes, these discharges merely have floating matter removed from them — if even that.
This is being made worse by another problem that is more familiar to those keeping tabs on California in the news.
NIMBYism leaves California cities with too few homes. Disastrous budgets leave them with inadequate resources to care for the homeless. Political correctness, combined with a bad ruling by liberal Ninth Circuit judges, leave the homeless taking over the cities. As a result of “‘piles of human feces’ on sidewalks and streets” generated by people defecating there, Wheeler wrote, “EPA is concerned about the potential water quality impacts from pathogens and other contaminants from untreated human waste entering nearby waters. San Francisco, Los Angeles and the state do not appear to be acting with urgency to mitigate the risks to human health and the environment that may result from the homelessness crisis.”
To make matters worse, Wheeler accused California regulators of allowing discharges of poisonous and carcinogenic contaminants by various private and public entities — the city of Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, a sanitary district in Marin County — that exceed permitted amounts. In other words, even as Californians are forced to endure regulatory debates and court battles over whether their coffee has to be labeled a carcinogen under state law, those same regulators are letting cyanide, indenopyrene, and copper be dumped into local waters in unacceptable quantities. The state now has 30 days to respond with remediation plans.
The irony here is that the self-righteous political exploitation of environmentalism is almost the state pastime in California. Yet, that doesn’t mean things actually get done to make the world a cleaner place. Rather, all this preening tends toward an embrace of ostentatious, extravagant policies, even if the basics are apparently neglected. Imagine: even as California solons strain out the gnat of America’s rapidly declining contribution to world carbon emissions, they are forcing their residents to swallow a foul, toxic, carcinogenic camel.
