LA City Election Wrap-Up

First of all, the turnout was indeed 15%, down from 28% for the primary just four years ago. That's mainly due to the top of the ticket, which was competitive last time around and featured just Antonio Villaraigosa and a bunch of tomato cans this time. But I don't think Villaraigosa should be celebrating about his performance. Despite 4 years of work as the Mayor, despite a field of underfunded nobodies, he actually got LESS votes in 2009 than he did in 2005. His support has diminished and not increased. And the seas are about to get a lot choppier.

Flanked onstage by Weiss, sometime-rival City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, Villaraigosa turned to the mounting challenges ahead from the city's looming $1 billion deficit to the possibility of widespread layoffs.

"I know these are troubled times for many of our families -- you see I've traveled around the city for the past few months and I witnessed the anxiety rising," Villaraigosa said. "I have a simple message for Los Angeles tonight, we're going to rebound out of this economic crisis and we will emerge stronger than ever."

The guy who is less likely to emerge stronger than ever is Villaraigosa. He ended up with just 56% of the vote after running a dismissive non-campaign where he refused to debate and spent almost no time in the city. One of his top lieutenants, Jack Weiss, is now in a runoff for city attorney despite spending millions on his campaign. And Measure B, the solar power initiative which the mayor backed, is too close to call at this hour, as provisionals and late absentees are tabulated.

That's an objectively terrible performance. And it should stop the Mayor from thinking about his next campaign so quickly. The enduring image of the Villaraigosa tenure is a crane alongside a half-built skyscraper. He is full of good ideas that never get the follow-through they deserve. That's what this election was like - he was already thinking about the Governor's race before finishing his re-election campaign. This may now be a fatal blow, but it doesn't look good for him. The Mayor of Los Angeles is a challenging, maddeningly complex position. It would be nice if the current occupant paid more attention to it.

The Green Way Out

Scott Gold at the LA Times reports today on a massive solar project that may alleviate some of the pain felt in the Antelope Valley:

The buzz in the Antelope Valley these days is about a company called eSolar, which is putting the finishing touches on a thermal solar energy facility here -- 24,000 mirrors that glitter like diamonds when you approach on Avenue G. There are plans for several more facilities in the area, all larger, the company says.

Local officials are atwitter at the possibilities. Visitors and investors are expected from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. A slew of jobs would be created; there were 225 people working last week on the Avenue G facility alone, most of them locals. Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said the solar plants could be the catalyst to restoring the sort of "intellectual excitement" that existed when aerospace, still a vital industry here, was the only game in town -- when "if it went up, it came out of here," he said.

"Now, we're going to go a long way toward saving this world," the mayor said. "Right here in Lancaster."

I think it's important to classify projects like this as what they are - INFRASTRUCTURE projects. Too often we confine ourselves to thinking about infrastructure as solely referring to fixing roads or building physical structures like bridges. A 21st-century energy creation system is the most important infrastructure improvement we can make, one that will not only create jobs but save billions in public health and environmental degradation costs. Any stimulus from the federal government that includes infrastructure improvements should help incentivize companies like eSolar, as well as laying down high-speed broadband lines throughout the country, building a transferable energy grid, etc.

In the recent past in California, the way a depressed city could revitalize their economy was to bring a prison into town. Now, the potential of green jobs is being realized, making the future (pardon the pun) sunnier:

It's heady talk, and people are listening. Lancaster and the surrounding valley are suffering, even by the standards of a community that long ago acclimated to a boom-and-bust cycle. Many here are living on the edge, and some beyond, with tens of thousands more expected to arrive in coming years.

There is a sense that development cannot come fast enough, not with shops closing, one in five people living in poverty, high unemployment and the highest mortality rate in Los Angeles County. Not with so many houses falling into foreclosure that the city of Lancaster has gone into real estate -- buying and renovating empty homes to slow the decline of neighborhoods.

"It's bad," said William Turner, 21, who got a job installing eSolar mirrors through a temp agency. He is among those vying for one of the full-time positions the company will offer soon; competition will be fierce and many of those hired will be overqualified for their jobs, officials said.

"People around here are really hurting," Turner said. "We need a change."

The new energy economy is California's way out of the economic crisis. Whether it's building solar and wind plants or transferable energy grids or carbon capture and sequestration retrofitting or green building add-ons or the next generation of green cars, the potential for bringing hope to downtrodden communities, creating millions of jobs and protecting the planet is great.

California Campaign Update

A mini-report:

• CA-04: I love this video from the Charlie Brown campaign. They traveled 412 miles down to Thousand Oaks to talk to constituents of California's Alan Keyes, State Senator and professional office-chaser Tom McClintock. It's really funny and drives the point home that McClintock is a do-nothing at best and a dangerous radical at worst:



And get this, McClintock is now running on the state budget, the Republican version of which has a 19% approval rating. That's like putting Nixon, Bush and Cheney in your campaign ad.

• CA-26, CA-45: Not one but two! Both Russ Warner AND Julie Bornstein have been added to the DCCC "Races To Watch" list. This is a prelude to being listed as Red To Blue candidates. If the D-Trip comes through with some money, maybe threatened incumbents like Dreier will have to stop mouthing off about other GOP races and start paying attention to their own.

• CA-46: When John Fund tries to target a Dem challenger, you know something's going wrong. Fund is sounding the alarm on Debbie Cook, as Dana Rohrabacher tries to greenwash himself with a scheme to build solar-power plants on federal land without environmental impact studies. Fund says that Cook called this "an extreme position," but he chopped the quote:

Democratic challenger and Mayor of Huntington Beach Debbie Cook agrees that the process of approving solar power plants is sluggish and needs to be sped up, but not at the expense of the environment.

"This is just another extreme position by Dana Rohrabacher. What we need to do is come up with a balanced approach that streamlines these projects, because they're critically important to our energy future, but at the same time recognizes the impacts to the environment," Cook said.

Rohrabacher's doing the equivalent of saying he'll grow jobs by hiring 10,000 federally funded serial killers, and then wondering why everyone's worried about the mass death ("You wanted jobs, didn't you?"). There's a sensible way to free up the bottlenecks and a rash one. Rohrabacher chose door #2.

• CA-42: The internal poll results released by Ed Chau are intriguing (showing him up 44-38 after a mix of positive and negative information released on the candidates), but I don't think candidates who have minimal bank accounts should do polls stating the numbers after a mix of information if they don't have the money to get that information out. But if Gary Miller truly has a 28% re-elect number as the poll states, he could be in trouble.

The Great California Job Suck Continues

Over-reliance on multiple economic bubbles has led this state to a worse job profile than Ohio and a state government utterly incapacitated to do anything about it.

SACRAMENTO -- California's unemployment rate climbed to a 12-year high last month as the state continued to bleed jobs in the real estate and construction industries.

The rate jumped to 7.3% in July from 7% in June. It was even worse in the Inland Empire, where the unemployment rate is approaching 9%, the state reported Friday.

"The depth and magnitude of the job losses are accelerating, clearly," said Esmael Adibi, director of economic research at Chapman University in Orange.

Adibi and other economists believe unemployment will continue rising next year even if the economy stabilizes. "Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is a lagging indicator," he said.

Once the economy improves, people who have fallen out of the job market will jump back in, which will keep the unemployment rate well into the 7% range through much of next year, he said.

California has lost jobs in 10 of the past 12 months, and the rate is 2 points higher than it was just a year ago.

I think it's very clear how we got here. Nationally, multinational corporations have moved manufacturing jobs overseas and narrowed the job market to few options beyond the service sector. The knowledge economy and the housing boom provided an artificial cushion, but when they went bust there were no alternatives for the middle class. And when the legislature is so sclerotic and logjammed that they can't respond to any crisis, the cruelties of the free market take over.

What's also clear is that they way out of this is with a sustainable new economy based on green-collar manufacturing jobs that stay right here. The need to innovate our way out of the climate crisis provides a stellar opportunity that is starting to be realized.

Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

“These market-leading projects we have in California are something that can be extrapolated around the world,” Jennifer Zerwer, a spokeswoman for the utility, said. “It’s a milestone.”

This is about 57 times the largest photovoltaic plant currently in the United States. Without the state mandate it simply would not be built. So there's a role to play for the state in encouraging job growth in the green sector. This is a time with a lot of suffering, but with proper effort that could turn around. That, and letting the government actually do their job.

Iraq: Solar Dynamo

It kind of makes me want to punch out every window in my house that we're now falling behind Iraq in the solar power chase.

In a city with constant electricity shortages but no lack of sunshine, the new buzz is solar energy.

Teams of engineers have appeared along major Baghdad roadways, bolting panels and bulbs to rows of towering steel poles to make solar-powered streetlights.

The workers who turned up recently in the upscale Karada district approached the task with near-religious fervor.

"We are lighting up the city with solar power," Sajad Hussein declared when queried by curious residents. "People say it is a gift from God."

Now, Iraq is doing this because they can't get their grid in working order, not out of concern for the environment. But here in the US of A, the President put a two-year moratorium on solar project development in public lands in the West until outcry forced him to reverse it It seems that there's less bureaucratic red tape for solar developers in frickin' BAGHDAD than here.

On a somewhat related and more hopeful note, here's a great interview between Grist and the woman who may become Vice President, Kathleen Sebelius, who has tirelessly fought against the construction of new coal-fired power plants as Governor of Kansas and increased their wind energy output. She found a way to sell that in conservative Kansas - by arguing (correctly) that future carbon pricing costs will be borne by the state with additional coal plants, and most of the benefit in energy would be going elsewhere anyway - and it's a good lesson for how we can move forward on renewables.

When Politics Is Not Enough

Tomorrow the President will sign an energy bill that will increase the nation's fuel efficiency by 40%. That's significant, but it's also correct to sniff that such a move would bring US cars "into the 1980s." The special interests, the oil and gas companies, have worked their magic for so long that even a major step forward like this looks woefully insufficient.

Plus, the massive subsidy to corn-based ethanol inside the bill could have a devastating impact on our oceans.

The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing "dead zone" — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

The dead zone was discovered in 1985 and has grown fairly steadily since then, forcing fishermen to venture farther and farther out to sea to find their catch. For decades, fertilizer has been considered the prime cause of the lifeless spot.

With demand for corn booming, some researchers fear the dead zone will expand rapidly, with devastating consequences.

"We might be coming close to a tipping point," said Matt Rota, director of the water resources program for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group. "The ecosystem might change or collapse as opposed to being just impacted."

The energy necessary to grow and process corn, too, blunts its effectiveness as an alternative source of fuel.

Ultimately, the peculiarities of the modern political scene, with its diametric opposition on so many issues and its belief in the art of the compromise, means that we may never fully deal with the problem of our impact on the environment. Real change is probably far more likely to come from the technological arena. Indeed, 21 billion of the 36 billion gallons of alternative fuel mandated by the energy bill must come from cellulosic ethanol like switchgrass and wood chips. And eventually, Moore's Law will kick in on other renewable sources as well.

Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

We've had the technology to harness the sun since the 1970s. If it can be made so affordable that the market would be fools to pass it up, then you have a tipping point. That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for a renewable energy standard next year, or removing subsidies for oil extraction. It means you fight on as many fronts as possible to reach a solution.

Tomorrow - Toward A New Energy Future

As long as we're talking about what we're all doing this weekend, I will be your intrepid reporter tomorrow, live from the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles at the Presidential Forum on Global Warming and Our Energy Future, sponsored by the California League of Conservation Voters, the enviro website Grist and PRI's "Living On Earth" radio program. Grist will have a live webcast of the forum tomorrow at 2:00pm PT. You can find it here. I'm expecting to liveblog the event at Calitics as well.

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich are scheduled to attend, and speak for a half-hour on the environmental and energy proposals they would support as President. The good news is that practically all of our Democratic candidates, even the ones who aren't attending, have put out strong policies on fighting global warming and expanding renewable energy, from Chris Dodd's corporate carbon tax to Bill Richardson's ambitious CAFE standard porposal (50MPG) to Barack Obama's 100% auction for a cap-and-trade system, where polluters would have to buy their carbon credits and not be given them. Clinton and Edwards have also put out bold proposals in this arena, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about them tomorrow.

One thing you all can do TODAY is take action on the imminent federal energy bill. There are three planks that everyone would like to see in it; a federal renewable energy standard that would mandate a healthy percentage of all electricity come from renewables like solar and wind; tax incentives for renewable energy, both for corporations AND for individuals who put solar panels on their house (this would be vital is California is to reach its One Million Solar Roofs Initiative), and a major increase in CAFE standards. I believe that the first two would be signed by the President; he signed similiar legislation as the governor of Texas, and now Texas has MORE wind power than California. Environment California is asking people to email Speaker Pelosi today and ask her to stand strong on the federal energy bill.

UPDATE: This ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is a positive step, requiring the Bush Administration to force SUVs and light trucks to meet the already-meager federal CAFE standards. This would close a loophole the automakers have been using for a while.