Confirmed: California Aquifers Contaminated With Billions Of Gallons of Fracking Wastewater

DeSmogBlog: "It was revealed yesterday that the California State Water Resources Board has sent a letter to the EPA confirming that at least nine of those sites were in fact dumping wastewater contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants into aquifers protected by state law and the federal Safe Drinking Water Act."

Fare-free Emeryville Go-Round is well-liked and needed

Virgin.com: "everyone on the Emeryville Go-round was using it to get from home to MacArthur BART station which would whisk them into work downtown. “If it wasn’t for the Go-Round I wouldn’t be able to live in Emeryville. It’s a nice place, you get more space for your money here, and there are great facilities which I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of if it wasn’t for the Go-Round,” said Rubiha Masidjana, an Emeryville resident."

SFpark Success – Cars Win Again!

Parking meters are expensive to install and maintain. How much #freetransit could you buy with this money? Many solutions for the problem of cars in the city are just a waste of money and prolong the problem.

SFpark Success – Shoup Wins Again! | ELP: "The report found that the average parking rates were lower, parking availability improved, the ease of finding and paying for parking improved, greenhouse gas emissions declined, and vehicle miles traveled decreased. "

June’s heat was record-breaking, for the planet, California and San Francisco - SFGate Blog

SFGate Blog: "June’s average temperature — 61.2 degrees — marked the 38th consecutive June that the mercury has been above the 20th century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

Cars feel cheap because you don't pay per trip

Co.Design | business + design: "Almost 40% of travel within San Francisco is taken by personal car. This does not include cars coming into or going out of the city. What are these people thinking? Probably that cars are really versatile, really convenient (if they are parked in your driveway), and even though you are paying hundreds of dollars per month in depreciation, insurance, parking, maintenance, and fuel costs, no one charges you to get in your own car and go, so they feel really cheap even though they're not."

Transit Last - San Francisco Transit Riders Union

sftru : "SAN FRANCISCO – Mayor Ed Lee gives away Sunday meters, fails to manage transit labor negotiations—stranding transit riders without warning—and pulls support for the Vehicle License Fee (VLF) which was to increase funding to Muni. Mayor Lee’s actions seem well on their way to amending the city charter to enforce a “transit last” policy.
 
"Somehow riders keep coming up at the short end of this stick,” said Daniel Sisson, SFTRU board member. "It is extremely difficult to see our city’s actions as anything but entirely hostile to the 700,000 transit riders each day. It’s a complete failure of leadership.”"

Write-down of two-thirds of US shale oil explodes fracking myth

Nafeez Ahmed: "Next month, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) will publish a new estimate of US shale deposits set to deal a death-blow to industry hype about a new golden era of US energy independence by fracking unconventional oil and gas.

EIA officials told the Los Angeles Times that previous estimates of recoverable oil in the Monterey shale reserves in California of about 15.4 billion barrels were vastly overstated. The revised estimate, they said, will slash this amount by 96% to a puny 600 million barrels of oil."

Benefits of #publictransit and true costs of driving in a cute video

Bus crowding is not a "problem," it is people voting with their feet for #publictransit. Gov't should respond.

Public transportation increased demand hurts on-time performance | www.ktvu.com: "About 704,000 people ride Muni each day. 
"We're at a five year high for system ridership," SFMTA Director of Transit John Haley told KTVU. "I think the people continue to want more Muni and continue to use it.""

#climatechange plan, no plan, poor to starve

California drought: Food banks drying up, too - SFGate: "With less local supply, food prices will spike, increasing as much as 34 percent for a head of lettuce and 18 percent for tomatoes, according to an Arizona State University study released last week. With fewer fields planted, there could be as many as 20,000 unemployed agricultural workers who will need more food handouts, especially in the Central Valley."

Bruce Maiman: Time to get smart about public transportation

The Sacramento Bee: "Public transportation guarantees you time to work, read, go wireless, even nap. How’s that for freedom?"

Bakersfield - Ride Earth Day GET Bus for FREE all month long

23ABC News: "Neighborhood design features that support transit, such as walkability and mixed land use, also support public health. In communities where there are safe places to walk within ten minutes of home, 43% of the residents achieve physical activity targets, compared with just 27% of residents in less walkable areas. Plus riding the bus reduces stress – someone else is driving!"

Response of capitalism to shortage: "use it faster"

California Drought Spawns Well Drilling Boom - ABC News: "The scarcity of irrigation water in drought-stricken California has created such a demand for well drilling services that Central Valley farmer Bob Smittcamp is taking matters into his own hands.

He's buying a drilling rig for $1 million to make certain he has enough water this summer for thousands of acres of fruit and vegetable crops."

We cannot afford business-as-usual in the age of energy and resource scarcity.

California Drought: San Joaquin Valley sinking as farmers race to tap aquifer

San Jose Mercury News: "The trends are alarming, the politics complex, but the science is rather simple: The Central Valley -- from Redding to Bakersfield -- is consuming twice as much groundwater as nature is returning through rain and snow."

Drought Forces Migrating Salmon to Go By Truck

Using fossil fuels to fix problem of fossil fuels. Can't work.

ABC News: "California’s drought is so severe this year that there is not enough water for salmon to make their annual trip up the Sacramento River to spawn, forcing the state to truck them instead, officials said."

Huge jump in people walking, biking and taking public transit, surveys find

Vallejo Times Herald: "Results from the California Household Travel Survey indicate the number of Californians choosing to walk, bicycle and use public transportation has more than doubled since the year 2000, according to an announcement about the survey released Monday."

Protest works! Google donates $6.8 million to fund free transit rides for San Francisco youth

The Verge: "Amid widespread protests over tech companies' use of public transit infrastructure, Google said today it would fund two years of free transit rides for San Francisco youth. The $6.8 million grant, which is said to be one of the largest private donations in the city's history, will fund the year-old Free Muni for Low Income Youth program. The cost of the program was previously paid by the city. More than 31,000 low-income youth, ages 5 to 17, have taken advantage of the program since it began a year ago."

Drought slams California, response? Raise bus fares, get more cars on the road.

(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Bakersfield Now: "BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) — As the drought continues to threaten California's vast agriculture industry, politicians at the federal level continue to work on comprehensive legislation aimed at releasing water to farmers and communities."

Muni planning to raise fares for public transportation

While the U.S. is plagued with flood and drought, the oil industry, through their trolls in government, want to raise fares on public transit to encourage more private car use.  

abc7news.com: "SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- If you're a Muni rider, you could soon be forced to pay more to ride. A proposal will be presented at a public hearing on Tuesday that includes a hike in fares to meet budget goals."

Tea Party fights to protect sprawl in Fresno, CA.

Fresno City Council Slams the Brakes on BRT | Streetsblog Capitol Hill: "But Barker said the system had become a target of local sprawl developers who allied themselves with Tea Party activists. The real target of the opposition, she says, wasn’t BRT but a general plan adopted by the city in 2012 that called for dramatically limiting sprawl and promoting walkable development in urban areas. Beefing up transit was critical to the proposal, and last night some elected leaders indicated they thought the two-year-old plan needed to be overhauled."

Humans are not "in charge" of the biosphere

Pro-growth agents promote the idea that humans always succeed and will solve climate change. The implication is that there is no need for activism, someone will take care of it.

Resource Insights: Is "the environment" now obsolete?: "But, we humans are not "in charge" of the biosphere. We are only competing and cooperating with various parts of it in a struggle to survive and thrive. Isn't it obvious by now that the biosphere does not always do what we want it to do and only what we want it to do? It's as if the law of unintended consequences has never occurred to Ellis.

Given that we know now that all organisms try to remake the biosphere to their liking, this should make us far less confident that we can make everything turn out just fine for humans. Keep in mind that we face a bewildering and essentially incalculable array of actors with whom we are forced sometimes to fight and sometimes to cooperate. In fact, we cannot even know what all of them are and probably are only familiar with a small sliver of all that lives. Our knowledge of the biosphere and the Earth is not just imperfect, it is wildly imperfect. If we're so smart, why didn't we avoid changing the climate, devastating the fisheries, degrading the soil through rapid erosion, and lacing the air, water and soil with toxic chemicals in the first place?"

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Cars are major contributors to green house gases

High Country News: "As one might expect, most of the extra suburban emissions come from transportation. America’s suburbs, especially those in the West, were designed and built with the automobile in mind, making residents prisoners of their cars. Walking or biking from one’s cul-de-sac to work in the urban core can be a harrowing experience, and in some places virtually impossible. Even when progressive metros like Denver expand the public transit web out into the ‘burbs, it’s not always easy to get from home to the bus stop without driving, and if you’re driving to the bus stop, why not just keep going all the way to work?"



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Not much snow in Tahoe as drought continues

Sunny Sierra raises chilling drought fears - SFGate: "The state's frozen water supply, as snow is known to water-resources officials, is 19 percent of normal for this time of year, according to electronic measurements taken across the Sierra. This is the water that is going to be used to irrigate millions of acres of farmland and quench the thirst of many of California's 38 million people when it melts in the spring."

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