Larry Glass, NEC Board President
Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director
Measure A: What Happens Next?
Now that the primary election is behind us and Measure A (the Cannabis Reform Initiative) was soundly defeated it’s time to take a deeper look at local cannabis regulations. One thing the measure got right was accurately identifying the problem: the seemingly corrupted county process that was allowing larger and larger grows to come into remote areas, disconnected from infrastructure. It also correctly identified the fact that there were too many people drawing water out of creeks and underground aquifers and the loser in that scenario is the wildlife and any other users downstream.
Many people asked us why we were not supporting measure A. The answer is complicated, but to try and state it simply, we didn’t think it would fix the problem. Instead of a more straightforward measure with the built-in ability to amend it as the situation evolved, the proponents opted for a complicated measure that, because of the nature of the initiative process, could only be amended by another vote of the people. And it lacked mechanisms for enforcement, something that the County was falling short on already.
In our opinion, it failed to address the main problem: uneven enforcement of existing regulations by the Humboldt County Planning Department. A good portion of the public outcry about the broken cannabis system in Humboldt County has to do with the failure of the planning department to enforce its own regulations in a uniform and fair way. A prime example is some licensed growers being inspected repeatedly while others were ignored. New, ever-larger grows were not being held to the same standard that little mom and pop growers are held to. The problem is so outrageous that we decided to dedicate some of our limited resources to join with Citizens for a Sustainable Humboldt to file a lawsuit against the county over one of these huge proposed mega grows out in extremely rural and remote southern Humboldt County known as Rolling Meadow Ranch. That suit is still pending.
During the many discussions we had with people both for and against Measure A one thing was very clear to us: most people believed that the status quo was not helping anyone. So now is the time for those members of the board of supervisors who do not have a conflict of interest (including those two with ties to the industry who just won reelection) to step up and propose some much-needed reforms to the existing ordinance and demand that John Ford and his planning department start equally enforcing the regulations instead of propping up the pay-to-play system that seems to exist now.
The View (of Methane) from Space
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Harvard University will be monitoring global methane emissions from oil and gas production worldwide with a new satellite launched in early March from Southern California’s Vandenberg Air Force base. The 800-pound satellite, the first satellite owned by an environmental nonprofit, was launched via a SpaceX rocket. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is the private company that the US appears to be outsourcing much of its space exploration and development to. Called MethaneSAT, the satellite will circle the earth every 95 minutes, from 326 miles above the surface of the Earth. The data collected will be publicly available in near real-time.
Methane is the second leading driver of climate change after carbon dioxide and is responsible for approximately 30 percent of current warming. An estimated 60 percent of today’s methane emissions are the result of human activities like agriculture, fossil fuel extraction, and decomposition of landfill waste. In the oil and gas sector, methane leaks or is vented at every point in the supply chain.
Curbing methane emissions is widely viewed as the most effective way to slow the rate of climate change in the near term due to its intense heat-trapping capacity and the relatively short amount of time that it remains in earth’s atmosphere. It is believed that we can dramatically reduce the rate of climate change over the next couple of decades by addressing methane and doing it aggressively, but the question remains as to whether more data will result in more emissions reduction measures.
It is expected that the EPA will release new regulations this spring that will require the oil and gas sector to reduce methane emissions by nearly 80 percent. Having accurate data on US emissions from fossil fuel development will help determine what an 80 percent reduction is, but that knowledge will need to be coupled with strong enforcement mechanisms in order to be effective. To paraphrase the saying from the old G.I. Joe cartoon, knowing is only half the battle. Actually doing something with that knowledge is the other half.