Introduction - Kathleen Gildred, Director of SCCED
State of the Local Environment and Economy - Jim Stewart, Associate Director of SCCED
Air Quality: How can we make our air safe to breathe? - Linda Waade, Executive Director of the Coalition for Clean Air
Regional Transportation: How can we avoid "Gridlock 2020"? - Gloria Ohland, California Director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP)
Water Conservation: How can we prepare for the next drought? - Elsa Lopez, Project Director for Mothers of East Los Angeles
Waste Management: Our progress on meeting state mandates - Joe Haworth, Public Information Officer for L.A. County Sanitation Districts
The State of the World 1997 - Lester Brown, President of Worldwatch Institute

Kathleen Gildred, Director of SCCED: I want to welcome you to our conference on the State of the World and the Region, looking at the progress we've made and what still needs to be done five years after the Earth Summit.

I am pleased to announce that our new web site will present the report from this conference as well as the reports from all of SCCED's seven previous conferences and many forums and task forces. The site will also have descriptions and links to hundreds of important environment and development agencies and organizations, locally, nationally and globally. The address is: www.scced.org

For the past four years, SCCED has worked to bring together people from the different sectors to achieve consensus on programs and policies for the environment and development in Southern California. SCCED came into being in 1993 as a continuation of the multi-sector dialogue process begun at the 1992 UN. Earth Summit in Rio. There, sectors that had been very much opposed to each other, such as environment groups and development interests, recognized that the only way to solve our problems, globally, nationally, locally was to work together to ensure a healthy environment, sustainable economy and high quality of life for all people.

There were some agreements made in Rio, such as Agenda 21, but many of us who attended were frustrated by the lack of definitive international decisions and commitments. In the end, it seems the slogan of the Earth Summit, "It's in our hands" applies. We need to demonstrate that sustainable programs can work locally, so that national governments can make decisions and commitments based on proven programs. We are working toward developing a sort of local Agenda 21, seeking to evolve toward a sustainable future for the region.

In order to build a sustainable agenda locally, we need to measure where are we and what needs to be done. So, for the past four years, we have prepared an Annual Indicator Report on the State of the Local Environment and Economy, which will be presented this year by Jim Stewart.

Jim Stewart, Associate Director of SCCED: We have analyzed environment and development trends for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) 6-county area (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial Counties). Detailed information is available in the report "Indicators of the State of the Local Environment and Economy - 1997."

The report shows a projected 40% increase in population, and a decreasing personal income. It indicates that air quality is improving, but it still causes thousands of deaths per year and costs billions in health expenses and lost income.

Transportation congestion will increase drastically in the years ahead, causing a dramatic drop in average highway speeds and greatly increasing commuting times. This will also affect the economy by slowing the movement of cars, trucks and buses.

The pollution in Santa Monica Bay continues to increase, causing significant numbers of respiratory and other illnesses among those that swim near storm drains.

However, solid waste diverted to landfills continues to decrease as more and more families participate in recycling programs.

Land use patterns are a problem as urban sprawl continues to eat up potential park land and wildlife habitats.

Linda Waade, Executive Director, Coalition for Clean Air: Air pollution is not only aesthetically displeasing, but seriously damages our lungs and hurts our health. In our region, asthma incidence is on the rise. Asthma restricts breathing, almost like sucking all your air through a straw. Air pollution complicates other health problems also.

We can make our air safe, if our regulators and elected officials have the courage to adopt and implement the laws and regulations we need to protect our health. Last year the California legislature tried to take funding and authority away from the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). We need industry to make the commitment to put in the necessary advanced air pollution technology. To generate the political and corporate will takes the involvement of each of us in this room, and the broader community -- we need to reach out and involve others.

We have gotten lazy about pollution because the air has become significantly better over the past thirty years. Twenty years ago we had Stage I smog alerts in more than 100 days of the year. But because of strong regulations and the cooperation of industry, we had only 7 such alerts last year.

This progress has sparked a move by industry to roll back clean air regulations, but we still have the dirtiest air in the nation. It would take the combined pollution of 40 other major metropolitan areas to reach our pollutant level. To achieve clean, healthy air by 2010, we need stricter regulations. The US EPA has proposed new standards for ozone and particulate matter. The latter is responsible for 64,000 annual deaths in US, including 8,700 in the South Coast Air Basin. Mobile sources (cars and trucks) are responsible for 60% of our region's pollution, however, our stationary sources are the cleanest in the country. We are working on public advocacy, citizen outreach. Call the Coalition for Clean Air at 310-260-4770.

You can call 1-888-TELL-EPA to indicate your concerns and comments on air quality. It is important to support the National Clean Air Act.

Diesel trucks and buses emit very dangerous particulates. MTA has adopted a policy to only purchase clean fuel busses, which will be CNG (compressed natural gas) or electric. We are supporting the "Dump Diesel Campaign," including incentives for conversion from diesel to CNG. Air pollution is decreasing our life span, but working together we can clean up our air.

Q: The AQMD Board of Science Advisors resigned in mass in 1996 because the AQMD Board adopted a weaker Clean Air Plan. What's happening now?

A: The 1994 Clean Air Plan was finally approved by the US EPA in October 1996. This was the first time Southern California has had an approved air quality plan. It is now citizen-enforceable, meaning that the AQMD and California Air Resources Board can be citizen-sued if they do not enforce the plan. However, the 1997 AQMD Clean Air Plan rolls back several regulations which are needed for better air quality.

Q: Do you oppose Playa Vista?

A: We have no position on Playa Vista, but we are concerned about the traffic and air quality implications of such a large development.

Gloria Ohland, California Director of Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP): We are working with a national coalition of transportation groups to support re-authorization of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). This bill provides Federal money for local regions with the flexibility for mass transit or highway projects as needed. However, the petroleum and highway lobbies want all the money for roads.

Los Angeles' unsustainable transportation "system" is a national joke. We have left transportation planning in the hands of planners who work with the lobbyists. Our transportation problems are caused by the old ways of thinking. The result is poor quality air, bad congestion, urban sprawl, damage to the watershed, global climate change, and a drain on our urban economy.

We have to figure out how to reduce the need to travel. We need to reorient our communities around public transit and pedestrian travel. We need higher density development along transit lines, infill development, and mixed use development.

Here in Southern California, we have paved over paradise. We have designed our cities for autos, not pedestrians. In contrast, Washington, DC is walkable -- people enjoy short walks from subway stops to offices, shops and outdoor cafes.

The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) predicts that we will add to our region six million people -- two cities the population of Chicago -- in the next two decades. They point out that half of the $81 billion to be spent on transportation will benefit the wealthy, with only 5% helping the poor. In addition, there is an anti-tax sentiment that will probably mean less Federal money for transportation. A hopeful sign is the 1991 ISTEA that gave local governments flexibility in spending transportation money. Another is the interest in livable communities, especially by the urbanist movement of architects. Even the MTA has some innovative ideas we need to support. Call me at 310-815-3103 for more information.

Q: Why do people who earn more money, get more benefits? Don't subways and buses serve lower income communities?

A: Wealthier people use the highways more, as well as commuter rail. Remember the MTA is spending as much on HOV lanes as on rail and bus together. Our subsidy of the automobile is very large,

Elsa Lopez, Project Director for Mothers of East Los Angeles: We are a women's organization, but we employ men in our water conservation programs. We started our water program in 1992 because we found people in East L.A. were not taking advantage of the rebate program for low flush toilets. We got a grant to buy toilets in bulk and give them to the residents. We have installed 67,000 toilets so far, saving millions of gallons a year. Now 85% of homes in the East Side have been retrofitted, a much higher percentage than in the San Fernando Valley area.

Los Angeles County is a world leader in water conservation. By installing nearly 1 million low flush toilets, we have 66% less water flowing through the Hyperion sewage disposal plant.

Q: Do you teach the public how to reduce water use in showers, dish washing, etc.?

A: We go door to door with materials on how to conserve. We give out low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators. We do outdoor and indoor water conservation audits, including how to do landscaping to reduce water. We also work in schools, but we need to educate the public more, such as using native plants that don't need watering.

Our biggest problem is we have not had much interest from the media. We have told the L.A. Times many times about our work and they have not printed the information.

Q: What about free classes to gardeners and Home Associations to stop wasting water?

A: We are developing a curriculum to educate gardeners on water conservation products that will start in July. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power used to emphasize recycled water for universities, parks and recreation, etc., but that effort seems to be slowing down now.

Q: How safe is our drinking water?

A: Much of our ground water is contaminated from leaking landfills, service stations and abandoned industrial plants, but the water quality in your home is okay, as long as you don't have lead pipes in your house. I do not believe it is necessary to drink bottled water.

Q: Chlorine disinfection of water produces bad by-products which cause 2/3 of all human cancers. We should shift to ozone disinfection. You should buy a home water purifier, rather than use bottled water which adds to the landfill problem.

Joe Haworth, Public Information Officer, L.A. County Sanitation Districts: Through water conservation we are saving 200 million gallons per day, and have saved the construction of a $200 million sewage treatment plant. The problem is not using plastic bottles and aluminum cans, it is that we haven't been recycling enough of them.

In 1988 L.A. County dumped in landfills 50 thousand tons of trash per day, a third of which was demolition/construction waste. In 1990 the state passed a law requiring 25% recycling by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000. Now we are down to 36 thousand tons per day, a lot because of less demolition/construction waste, and some because of consumer recycling. Unfortunately 80-90% of green waste material goes to landfills, but we use it for land cover.

We have made the 25% target, but 50% will be much tougher. Only about 30% of the population currently participates in recycling -- primarily because of low participation in multi-family apartments. We need to look at both source reduction (such as packaging) and recycling. We have to concentrate on educating consumers to get behavioral changes.

The SCCED Solid Waste Task Force estimates that to reach the 50% diversion level, we have to double the number of participating families to 60%. We need the cooperation of business and the media. As the costs of landfills go up, your trash bill could go up. We could reward people by reducing their trash bill by the amount they recycle. As Lee Strasberg said, "Divine dissatisfaction inspires you to go on, but destructive self-criticisms keep you from progressing."

The search for new landfills is not going well because of local opposition. The only reason we don't have a trash train out to the desert now is because Orange County is taking all our trash for cash. A problem is that the price paid for recyclables has dropped, so the cash flow back to the cities has decreased, reducing the incentive.

Q: What about the high cost of buying recycled products, such as paper?

A: Now that governments are starting to purchase recycled products, the volume is increasing and the price is dropping.

Kathleen Gildred, Director of SCCED: The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 made clear the connections between the local and global environments. Think globally, act locally is still important. The State of the World reports from the Worldwatch Institute are the foremost source of information on the global environment. They tell us the state of our atmosphere, water, and species and how we need to change our habits to continue life on this planet. We are pleased to have the foremost global authority on the state of the environment with us to look at the situation 5 years after the Earth Summit.

Lester Brown, President, Worldwatch Institute: When we started working on the State of the World 1997, we found there has been some progress since Rio in a few countries, but the results are not consistent with the excitement at Rio. Despite all the promises made at Rio, the world has added 450 million people, the climate is changing and deforestation is even more serious a problem, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Canada is losing a million hectares of forest a year, and so is Russia.

In spite of pledges to return to 1990 levels, carbon emissions have drastically increased -- altering the earth's climate. The US is up 6%, Japan up 9%. Germany has reduced emissions by 10%, primarily by ending the industrial inefficiency in Eastern Germany. Russia has reduced its emissions by 28%, but economic production is down by 40%. Other problems are species loss, soil erosion, overfishing, water pollution, etc. Poverty is a series issue as over 1.3 billion people are trying to live on $1 a day or less.

The E-8 Countries

Eight countries together include 56% of the world's population, 59% of its economic output, 53% of world's forested area, and 58% of the carbon emissions. We call these environmental heavyweights, the E-8 -- they include Brazil, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, and the United States. We suggest the meetings of the major industrial nations, the so-called G-7 countries, which include only a small fraction of the world's population, become E-8 meetings.

State of the Ozone Layer

The biggest success in the international environment has been the reduction in CFC emissions. Our State of the World 1997 looked at this as a case study in what we can learn about international environmental cooperation. It began in 1974, when two scientists at the University of California at Irvine published a paper in Nature that hypothesized that CFCs would set in place a chain of chemical reactions that would deplete the stratospheric ozone layer so essential to shield us from the sun's deadly ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Public and media reaction led to bans on the use of CFCs in aerosol cans in the U.S. and Canada by the end of the decade and in Europe soon after.

In 1977, 33 national governments and the European Community created a World Plan of Action on Ozone Layer, including global scientific collaborative research. As a result, in 1985 two British scientists reported a hole, larger than the US, in the ozone layer over Antarctica that let in unprecedented amounts of UV radiation. It is interesting that NASA had a polar orbiting satellite that had been picking up the problem for years, but the satellite was programmed to ignore such extreme numbers as "errors."

Immediately the National Science Foundation sent a team to Anarctica and decided the hole was caused by CFCs. They held a press conference to announce their tentative findings, because the scientists were fearful that the hole might expand rapidly. The result was the signing in 1987 of the Montreal Protocol to cut production of CFCs in half by 1998. But in 1988 the world's largest producer of CFCs, DuPont, announced it was completely ending production of CFCs before the year 2000.

In 1991, NASA announced that ozone depletion was progressing twice as fast as expected over parts of the Northern Hemisphere, causing a projected additional 200,000 deaths from skin cancer in the U.S over the next 50 years. At the 1992 Copenhagen meeting, the phase-out date for industrial countries was advanced to 1996 for CFCs and some other ozone-destroying chemicals.

The results in 1996 are a reduction of CFC production by 76% and a projected nearly complete phase-out in the next 10 years. The problem is that some developing countries are continuing CFC production, notably China, India and the Philippines (some of which is now being illegally smuggled back into the U.S. for auto air-conditioners).

Storms Around the World

Our conclusion is that the world can change behavior in response to new information, if we are sufficiently scared about the implications. The purpose of the Worldwatch Institute is to provide information to aid the process of change to move the world toward a sustainable economic system. The question is what might be the climate equivalent of the hole in the ozone layer?

Although governments promised in Rio to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels, the results have not been encouraging, as only a few political and corporate leaders are sensing the need to engage environment issues. Recently I talked about the State of the World in eight European countries and met with three heads of state. They were concerned about the declining ocean fish catch, the scarcity of fresh water, and the extreme climate events.

The recent spate of storms, heat, floods, and droughts are drastically affecting the insurance industry. Last year the CEOs of the 60 largest global insurance companies signed a statement urging governments to cut carbon emissions to reduce global climate change. This is a very significant development, but we don't yet have critical mass for a major development at the Kyoto Conference in December 1997.

The 11 warmest years, since record keeping started in 1866, have all been since 1979. In the past century through the 1980s, there were $16 billion in storm-related losses. In the first six years of the 1990s, storms have cost $66 billion, which is causing alarm throughout the insurance industry. Hurricane Andrew took down 60,000 buildings and several insurance companies. In addition, typhoons did $26 billion in damage in China last year, forcing 2 million people from their homes.

Global warming is a serious matter, but what will wake us up? What will get the globe moving on an environmentally sustainable path? Falling sperm counts could scare us, or perhaps a new disease from the tropics? Or a dramatic climatic event striking a major metropolitan area? If Hurricane Andrew had hit Miami and New Orleans, it could have tripled the amount of damage.

Food and Water Shortages

The first economic indicators that will signal that we are on an unsustainable path, will be rising food prices. The ocean catch has risen from 18 million tons in 1950 to 89 million tons in 1989, but has stayed the same since 1989. As world population increases, we will see a halving of the ocean catch per capita. Fish farming can't help much because it depends on growing more land-based food to feed the fish. And we are rapidly losing cropland through residential and commercial development and soil erosion.

Water tables are falling in all world's food growing regions from overpumping, but water scarcity is hard to photograph for the evening news. In the U.S. farmers greatly expanded irrigation by pumping from the great Ogallala Aquifer. But this is essentially a fossil aquifer, which is not significantly recharged by rain water. It is becoming so depleted now that in Texas irrigated land has decreased by 11%, forcing many farmers to return to less productive dryland farming.

China faces the most serious water problem. Prof. Chen told me that water tables in North Central China have fallen 35 meters over the last two decades, putting 100 million people at risk. Now the great water reservoirs around Beijing are only available to supply water for the city, leaving millions of farmers to dryland farming. To import a ton of wheat is saving the 1000 tons of water of it took to grow that wheat.

Now we have reached the physiological capacity of crops to use more fertilizer. Farmers in the U.S. and Europe are using less fertilizer than in the 1980s because it cannot boost soil fertility by enough to pay for itself. In addition, farmers now must deal with unpredictable local climate change. In July 1995, when Chicago went to a temperature of 105º for a week, 465 people died, and the corn crop withered.

World grain stocks dropped to the lowest level ever in 1996. The additional 80 million people per year, and the growth in affluence leading to increased meat consumption is putting increasing pressure on a decreasing grain supply. For example, the Chinese now want to diversify their diets to include eggs, poultry, beef, and beer -- they want to live like us in the U.S. To increase from 100 eggs per person per year in 1990 to 200 eggs per year will take 1.3 billion more hens. It will take more grain than all Australia exports to get that. One more bottle of beer per person in China takes 270,000 tons of grain. And China is losing cropland at a record rate from expansion of industry and housing.

China can afford to pay for imported grain from its $40 billion annual trade surplus but no one can grow the grain to supply them. Egg and milk consumption are also rising rapidly in India, putting more pressure on world's resources. This will cause rising grain prices. If grain prices doubled, it would not affect the U.S. much, but would drastically affect the 1.3 billion people in the world that now live on less than $1/day. If they take to the streets, the resulting instability could affect earnings of corporations, stock markets, international monetary system, pension fund earnings, etc.

Can We Go to Renewable Energy?

But none of the problems are unmanageable. We need to stabilize both world population and climate, and both could be done with existing technology -- if we made them global priorities.

Since Rio, 100 cities have developed their own plans for a sustainable future, but we need broader systemic change. To stabilize the climate, we need renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. I believe wind is going to be the energy source of the future and California is a global leader in that.

Change is possible. In 1990, we crossed the social threshold in Eastern Europe, and one morning we woke up and the Berlin Wall was down and change was irreversible.